Exposing Pink Slime Journalism: Linguistic Signatures and Robust Detection against LLM-Generated Threats
Sadat Shahriar, Navid Ayoobi, Arjun Mukherjee, Mostafa Musharrat, Sai Vishnu Vamsi Senagasetty
Abstract
The local news landscape, a vital source of reliable information for 28 million Americans, faces a growing threat from Pink Slime Journalism, a low-quality, auto-generated articles that mimic legitimate local reporting. Detecting these deceptive articles requires a fine-grained analysis of their linguistic, stylistic, and lexical characteristics. In this work, we conduct a comprehensive study to uncover the distinguishing patterns of Pink Slime content and propose detection strategies based on these insights. Beyond traditional generation methods, we highlight a new adversarial vector: modifications through large language models (LLMs). Our findings reveal that even consumer-accessible LLMs can significantly undermine existing detection systems, reducing their performance by up to 40% in F1-score. To counter this threat, we introduce a robust learning framework specifically designed to resist LLM-based adversarial attacks and adapt to the evolving landscape of automated pink slime journalism, and showed and improvement by up to 27%.- Anthology ID:
- 2025.ranlp-1.128
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing - Natural Language Processing in the Generative AI Era
- Month:
- September
- Year:
- 2025
- Address:
- Varna, Bulgaria
- Editors:
- Galia Angelova, Maria Kunilovskaya, Marie Escribe, Ruslan Mitkov
- Venue:
- RANLP
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- INCOMA Ltd., Shoumen, Bulgaria
- Note:
- Pages:
- 1109–1117
- Language:
- URL:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/corrections-2026-01/2025.ranlp-1.128/
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Sadat Shahriar, Navid Ayoobi, Arjun Mukherjee, Mostafa Musharrat, and Sai Vishnu Vamsi Senagasetty. 2025. Exposing Pink Slime Journalism: Linguistic Signatures and Robust Detection against LLM-Generated Threats. In Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing - Natural Language Processing in the Generative AI Era, pages 1109–1117, Varna, Bulgaria. INCOMA Ltd., Shoumen, Bulgaria.
- Cite (Informal):
- Exposing Pink Slime Journalism: Linguistic Signatures and Robust Detection against LLM-Generated Threats (Shahriar et al., RANLP 2025)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/corrections-2026-01/2025.ranlp-1.128.pdf