Artificial intelligence in fake news campaigns: experiments with ChatGPT

The scientific work of members of our Department was published in the Economics and Business Review journal. The article “Artificial intelligence – friend or foe in fake news campaigns” focuses on analyzing the impact of large language models (LLM) on the phenomenon of fake news. On the one hand decent text‐generation capabilities can be misused for mass fake news production. On the other, LLMs trained on huge volumes of text have already accumulated information on many facts thus one may assume they could be used for fact‐checking.

Experiments were designed and conducted to verify how much LLM responses are aligned with actual fact‐checking verdicts. The research methodology consisted of an experimental dataset preparation and a protocol for interacting with ChatGPT, currently the most sophisticated LLM. A research corpus was explicitly composed for the purpose of this research consisting of several thousand claims randomly selected from claim reviews published by fact‐checkers.

Authors of the publication: Krzysztof Węcel, Marcin Sawiński, Milena Stróżyna, Włodzimierz Lewoniewski, Ewelina Księżniak, Piotr Stolarski, Witold Abramowicz. The scientific article is available on website of the Economics and Business Review journal: journals.ue.poznan.pl/ebr/article/view/736

This research is supported by the project “OpenFact – artificial intelligence tools for verification of the veracity of information sources and fake news detection” (INFOSTRATEG-I/0035/2021-00), granted within the INFOSTRATEG I program of the National Center for Research and Development, under the topic: Verifying information sources and detecting fake news.