“All the News That’s Fit to Fabricate: AI-Generated Text As a Tool of Media Misinformation”, 2020-11-20 (; similar):
Online misinformation has become a constant; only the way actors create and distribute that information is changing. Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) such as GPT-2 mean that actors can now synthetically generate text in ways that mimic the style and substance of human-created news stories.
We carried out 3 original experiments to study whether these AI-generated texts are credible and can influence opinions on foreign policy. The first evaluated human perceptions of AI-generated text relative to an original story. The second investigated the interaction between partisanship and AI-generated news. The third examined the distributions of perceived credibility across different AI model sizes.
We find that individuals are largely incapable of distinguishing between AI-generated and human-generated text; partisanship affects the perceived credibility of the story; and exposure to the text does little to change individuals’ policy views.
The findings have important implications in understanding AI in online misinformation campaigns.
[Keywords: misinformation, disinformation, foreign policy, public opinion, media]