Machine-Made Media: Monitoring the Mobilization of Machine-Generated Articles on Misinformation and Mainstream News Websites
This research addresses the growing issue of AI-generated misinformation and its impact on news media, highlighting risks for public information integrity, though it is incremental as it builds on existing detection methods.
The study tackled the problem of machine-generated articles in online news by conducting a large-scale analysis of over 15.46 million articles from misinformation and mainstream websites, finding that synthetic news articles increased by 57.3% on mainstream sites and 474% on misinformation sites between January 2022 and May 2023.
As large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT have gained traction, an increasing number of news websites have begun utilizing them to generate articles. However, not only can these language models produce factually inaccurate articles on reputable websites but disreputable news sites can utilize LLMs to mass produce misinformation. To begin to understand this phenomenon, we present one of the first large-scale studies of the prevalence of synthetic articles within online news media. To do this, we train a DeBERTa-based synthetic news detector and classify over 15.46 million articles from 3,074 misinformation and mainstream news websites. We find that between January 1, 2022, and May 1, 2023, the relative number of synthetic news articles increased by 57.3% on mainstream websites while increasing by 474% on misinformation sites. We find that this increase is largely driven by smaller less popular websites. Analyzing the impact of the release of ChatGPT using an interrupted-time-series, we show that while its release resulted in a marked increase in synthetic articles on small sites as well as misinformation news websites, there was not a corresponding increase on large mainstream news websites.