Lying Blindly: Bypassing ChatGPT's Safeguards to Generate Hard-to-Detect
  Disinformation Claims at Scale
Freddy Heppell Mehmet E. Bakir Kalina Bontcheva
As Large Language Models (LLMs) become more proficient, their misuse in
large-scale viral disinformation campaigns is a growing concern. This study
explores the capability of ChatGPT to generate unconditioned claims about the
war in Ukraine, an event beyond its knowledge cutoff, and evaluates whether
such claims can be differentiated by human readers and automated tools from
human-written ones. We compare war-related claims from ClaimReview, authored by
IFCN-registered fact-checkers, and similar short-form content generated by
ChatGPT. We demonstrate that ChatGPT can produce realistic, target-specific
disinformation cheaply, fast, and at scale, and that these claims cannot be
reliably distinguished by humans or existing automated tools.