# Fighting Fire with Fire: The Dual Role of LLMs in Crafting and Detecting Elusive Disinformation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.15515 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.15515/

## Key facts

- Cited by 51 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 41 of its 71 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Oct 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 41)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [BERTScore: Evaluating Text Generation with BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09675/) (2019)
- [Large Language Models are Zero-Shot Reasoners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11916/) (2022)
- [Prefix-Tuning: Optimizing Continuous Prompts for Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00190/) (2021)
- [The Power of Scale for Parameter-Efficient Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08691/) (2021)
- [Longformer: The Long-Document Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05150/) (2020)
- [The Curious Case of Neural Text Degeneration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09751/) (2019)
- [DeBERTa: Decoding-enhanced BERT with Disentangled Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.03654/) (2020)
- [Code Llama: Open Foundation Models for Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12950/) (2023)
- [Making Pre-trained Language Models Better Few-shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15723/) (2020)
- [Convolutional Neural Networks for Sentence Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1408.5882/) (2014)
- [Exploiting Cloze Questions for Few Shot Text Classification and Natural Language Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.07676/) (2020)
- [A Multitask, Multilingual, Multimodal Evaluation of ChatGPT on Reasoning, Hallucination, and Interactivity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04023/) (2023)
- [The RefinedWeb Dataset for Falcon LLM: Outperforming Curated Corpora with Web Data, and Web Data Only](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.01116/) (2023)
- [Stanza: A Python Natural Language Processing Toolkit for Many Human Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.07082/) (2020)
- [Prompt Programming for Large Language Models: Beyond the Few-Shot Paradigm](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.07350/) (2021)
- [BLiMP: The Benchmark of Linguistic Minimal Pairs for English](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.00582/) (2019)
- [Is ChatGPT a General-Purpose Natural Language Processing Task Solver?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.06476/) (2023)
- [Paraphrasing evades detectors of AI-generated text, but retrieval is an effective defense](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13408/) (2023)
- [Can AI-Generated Text be Reliably Detected?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11156/) (2023)
- [FakeNewsNet: A Data Repository with News Content, Social Context and Spatialtemporal Information for Studying Fake News on Social Media](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.01286/) (2018)
- [WARP: Word-level Adversarial ReProgramming](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00121/) (2021)
- [Evaluating the Logical Reasoning Ability of ChatGPT and GPT-4](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03439/) (2023)
- [GSum: A General Framework for Guided Neural Abstractive Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.08014/) (2020)
- [TURINGBENCH: A Benchmark Environment for Turing Test in the Age of Neural Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.13296/) (2021)
- [FANG: Leveraging Social Context for Fake News Detection Using Graph Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.07939/) (2020)
- [COVID-Twitter-BERT: A Natural Language Processing Model to Analyse COVID-19 Content on Twitter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.07503/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 51)

- [Large Legal Fictions: Profiling Legal Hallucinations in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.01301/) (2024)
- [Detecting Multimedia Generated by Large AI Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.00045/) (2024)
- [DELL: Generating Reactions and Explanations for LLM-Based Misinformation Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.10426/) (2024)
- [Navigating LLM Ethics: Advancements, Challenges, and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.18841/) (2024)
- [Beemo: Benchmark of Expert-edited Machine-generated Outputs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.04032/) (2024)
- [What Does the Bot Say? Opportunities and Risks of Large Language Models in Social Media Bot Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.00371/) (2024)
- [RuBLiMP: Russian Benchmark of Linguistic Minimal Pairs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.19232/) (2024)
- [A Ship of Theseus: Curious Cases of Paraphrasing in LLM-Generated Texts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.08374/) (2023)
- [Detecting AI-Generated Text: Factors Influencing Detectability with Current Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.15583/) (2024)
- [Authorship Obfuscation in Multilingual Machine-Generated Text Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.07867/) (2024)
- [A Survey of AI-generated Text Forensic Systems: Detection, Attribution, and Characterization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.01152/) (2024)
- [Let Silence Speak: Enhancing Fake News Detection with Generated Comments from Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.16631/) (2024)
- [MultiSocial: Multilingual Benchmark of Machine-Generated Text Detection of Social-Media Texts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.12549/) (2024)
- [Fakes of Varying Shades: How Warning Affects Human Perception and Engagement Regarding LLM Hallucinations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.03745/) (2024)
- [Real-time Factuality Assessment from Adversarial Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.14651/) (2024)
- [PCoT: Persuasion-Augmented Chain of Thought for Detecting Fake News and Social Media Disinformation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.06842/) (2025)
- [Increasing the Robustness of the Fine-tuned Multilingual Machine-Generated Text Detectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.15128/) (2025)
- [Truth over Tricks: Measuring and Mitigating Shortcut Learning in Misinformation Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.02350/) (2025)
- [Robust Fake News Detection using Large Language Models under Adversarial Sentiment Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.15277/) (2026)
- [UBench: Benchmarking Uncertainty in Large Language Models with Multiple Choice Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.12784/) (2024)
- [MegaFake: A Theory-Driven Dataset of Fake News Generated by Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.11871/) (2024)
- [Masks and Mimicry: Strategic Obfuscation and Impersonation Attacks on Authorship Verification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.19099/) (2025)
- [Have LLMs Reopened the Pandora's Box of AI-Generated Fake News?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.19250/) (2024)
- [GuARD: Effective Anomaly Detection through a Text-Rich and Graph-Informed Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.03930/) (2024)
- [Enhancing Hallucination Detection through Perturbation-Based Synthetic Data Generation in System Responses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.05474/) (2024)
- [On the Risk of Evidence Pollution for Malicious Social Text Detection in the Era of LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.12600/) (2024)
- [A Multi-Task Evaluation of LLMs' Processing of Academic Text Input](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.11779/) (2025)
- [Entropy Guided Extrapolative Decoding to Improve Factuality in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.09338/) (2024)
- [When Detection Fails: The Power of Fine-Tuned Models to Generate Human-Like Social Media Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.09975/) (2025)
- [Lying Blindly: Bypassing ChatGPT's Safeguards to Generate Hard-to-Detect Disinformation Claims](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.08467/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent ubiquity and disruptive impacts of large language models (LLMs) have raised concerns about their potential to be misused (.i.e, generating large-scale harmful and misleading content). To combat this emerging risk of LLMs, we propose a novel "Fighting Fire with Fire" (F3) strategy that harnesses modern LLMs' generative and emergent reasoning capabilities to counter human-written and LLM-generated disinformation. First, we leverage GPT-3.5-turbo to synthesize authentic and deceptive LLM-generated content through paraphrase-based and perturbation-based prefix-style prompts, respectively. Second, we apply zero-shot in-context semantic reasoning techniques with cloze-style prompts to discern genuine from deceptive posts and news articles. In our extensive experiments, we observe GPT-3.5-turbo's zero-shot superiority for both in-distribution and out-of-distribution datasets, where GPT-3.5-turbo consistently achieved accuracy at 68-72%, unlike the decline observed in previous customized and fine-tuned disinformation detectors. Our codebase and dataset are available at https://github.com/mickeymst/F3.