With the increasing popularity of generative large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, 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 these 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 12.91 million articles from 3,074 misinformation and mainstream news websites. We find that between January 1, 2022 and April 1, 2023, the relative number of synthetic news articles increased by 79.4% on mainstream websites while increasing by 342% on misinformation sites. 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. Finally, using data from the social media platform Reddit, we find that social media users interacted more with synthetic articles in March 2023 relative to January 2022.

翻译：随着像ChatGPT这样的生成式大语言模型日益普及，越来越多的新闻网站开始利用它们生成文章。然而，这些语言模型不仅可能在知名网站上产生事实不准确的文章，而且不道德的新闻网站也可以利用这些大语言模型大规模制造虚假信息。为了开始理解这一现象，我们首次开展了大规模研究，探讨在线新闻媒体中合成文章的普遍程度。为此，我们训练了一个基于DeBERTa的合成新闻检测器，并对来自3074个虚假信息和主流新闻网站的1291万多篇文章进行了分类。我们发现，从2022年1月1日到2023年4月1日，主流网站上合成新闻文章的相对数量增加了79.4%，而虚假信息网站则增加了342%。通过中断时间序列分析ChatGPT发布的影响，我们表明，尽管其发布导致小型网站和虚假信息新闻网站的合成文章显著增加，但大型主流新闻网站并未出现相应增长。最后，利用社交平台Reddit的数据，我们发现相比于2022年1月，2023年3月社交媒体用户与合成文章的互动更多。