With the rise of AI-generated content spewed at scale from large language models (LLMs), genuine concerns about the spread of fake news have intensified. The perceived ability of LLMs to produce convincing fake news at scale poses new challenges for both human and automated fake news detection systems. To address this gap, this paper presents the findings from a university-level competition that aimed to explore how LLMs can be used by humans to create fake news, and to assess the ability of human annotators and AI models to detect it. A total of 110 participants used LLMs to create 252 unique fake news stories, and 84 annotators participated in the detection tasks. Our findings indicate that LLMs are ~68% more effective at detecting real news than humans. However, for fake news detection, the performance of LLMs and humans remains comparable (~60% accuracy). Additionally, we examine the impact of visual elements (e.g., pictures) in news on the accuracy of detecting fake news stories. Finally, we also examine various strategies used by fake news creators to enhance the credibility of their AI-generated content. This work highlights the increasing complexity of detecting AI-generated fake news, particularly in collaborative human-AI settings.

In this research short, we examine the potential of using GPT-4o, a state-of-the-art large language model (LLM) to undertake evidence synthesis and systematic assessment tasks. Traditional workflows for such tasks involve large groups of domain experts who manually review and synthesize vast amounts of literature. The exponential growth of scientific literature and recent advances in LLMs provide an opportunity to complementing these traditional workflows with new age tools. We assess the efficacy of GPT-4o to do these tasks on a sample from the dataset created by the Global Adaptation Mapping Initiative (GAMI) where we check the accuracy of climate change adaptation related feature extraction from the scientific literature across three levels of expertise. Our results indicate that while GPT-4o can achieve high accuracy in low-expertise tasks like geographic location identification, their performance in intermediate and high-expertise tasks, such as stakeholder identification and assessment of depth of the adaptation response, is less reliable. The findings motivate the need for designing assessment workflows that utilize the strengths of models like GPT-4o while also providing refinements to improve their performance on these tasks.