Misinformation and Manipulation

"Recent studies have demonstrated that LLMs can be exploited to craft deceptive narratives with levels of persuasiveness similar to human-generated content (Pan et al., 2023b; Spitale et al., 2023), to fabri- cate fake news (Zellers et al., 2019; Zhou et al., 2023f), and to devise automated influence operations aimed at manipulating the perspectives of targeted audiences (Goldstein et al., 2023). LLMs have also been found to be used in malicious social botnets (Yang and Menczer, 2023), powering automated accounts used to disseminate coordinated messages. More broadly, the use of LLMs for the deliberate generation of misleading information could significantly lower the barrier for propaganda and manip- ulation (Aharoni et al., 2024), as LLMs can generate highly credible misinformation with significant cost-savings compared to human authorship (Musser, 2023), while achieving considerable scale and speed of content generation (Buchanan et al., 2021; Goldstein et al., 2023)."