All the News That’s Fit to Fabricate: AI-Generated Text as a Tool of Media Misinformation

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. W...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published inJournal of experimental political science Vol. 9; no. 1; pp. 104 - 117
Main Authors Kreps, Sarah, McCain, R. Miles, Brundage, Miles
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published New York, USA Cambridge University Press 01.01.2022
Subjects
Artificial intelligence
Automation
Credibility
Elections
Experiments
False information
Foreign policy
Information dissemination
Internet
Language
Media coverage
Partisanship
Perceptions
Political science
Politics
Power
Public opinion
Research Article
Social networks
United States > US
Europe
disinformation
public opinion
media
foreign policy
misinformation
Online AccessGet full text

Cover

More Information
Summary: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 three 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- 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.
Bibliography:ObjectType-Article-1
SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1
ObjectType-Feature-2
content type line 14
ISSN:2052-2630
2052-2649
DOI:10.1017/XPS.2020.37