Related papers: A quick how-to user-guide to debunking pseudoscien…
Social media for news consumption is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, its low cost, easy access, and rapid dissemination of information lead people to seek out and consume news from social media. On the other hand, it enables the wide…
Background: Large language models (LLMs) are trained to follow directions, but this introduces a vulnerability to blindly comply with user requests even if they generate wrong information. In medicine, this could accelerate the generation…
Scientists in some fields are concerned that many, or even most, published results are false. A high rate of false positives might arise accidentally, from shoddy research practices. Or it might be the inevitable result of institutional…
Bootstrap percolation has been used to describe opinion formation in society and other social and natural phenomena. The formal equation of the bootstrap percolation may have more than one solution, corresponding to several stable fixed…
Established frameworks to understand problems with reproducibility in science begin with the relationship between our understanding of the prior probability of a claim and the statistical certainty that should be demanded of it, and explore…
The Internet and social media have altered how individuals access news in the age of instantaneous information distribution. While this development has increased access to information, it has also created a significant problem: the spread…
Scientific facts are often spun in the popular press with the intent to influence public opinion and action, as was evidenced during the COVID-19 pandemic. Automatic detection of misinformation in the scientific domain is challenging…
Probabilistic text generators have been used to produce fake scientific papers for more than a decade. Such nonsensical papers are easily detected by both human and machine. Now more complex AI-powered generation techniques produce texts…
Large language models (LLMs) can provide users with false, inaccurate, or misleading information, and we consider the output of this type of information as what Natale (2021) calls `banal' deceptive behaviour. Here, we investigate peoples'…
This paper describes Simpson's paradox, and explains its serious implications for randomised control trials. In particular, we show that for any number of variables we can simulate the result of a controlled trial which uniformly points to…
Contemporary approaches to assisted scientific discovery use language models to automatically generate large numbers of potential hypothesis to test, while also automatically generating code-based experiments to test those hypotheses. While…
Motivated by recent commentary that has questioned today's pursuit of ever-more complex models and mathematical formalisms in applied machine learning and whether meaningful empirical progress is actually being made, this paper tries to…
The generation and spread of fake news within new and online media sources is emerging as a phenomenon of high societal significance. Combating them using data-driven analytics has been attracting much recent scholarly interest. In this…
Recent progress in natural language processing (NLP) owes much to remarkable advances in large language models (LLMs). Nevertheless, LLMs frequently "hallucinate," resulting in non-factual outputs. Our carefully-designed human evaluation…
We investigate whether adding specific explanations from fact checking websites enhances trust in these flags. We experimented with 348 American participants, exposing them to a randomised order of true and false news headlines related to…
The rapid increase in fake news, which causes significant damage to society, triggers many fake news related studies, including the development of fake news detection and fact verification techniques. The resources for these studies are…
Benchmarks measure whether a model is correct. They do not measure whether a model is reliable. This distinction is largely academic for single-shot inference, but becomes critical for agentic AI systems, where a single rephrased prompt can…
As Large Language Models (LLMs) continue to advance, they are increasingly relied upon as real-time sources of information by non-expert users. To ensure the factuality of the information they provide, much research has focused on…
Most of the online news media outlets rely heavily on the revenues generated from the clicks made by their readers, and due to the presence of numerous such outlets, they need to compete with each other for reader attention. To attract the…
Scientific information expresses human understanding of nature. This knowledge is largely disseminated in different forms of text, including scientific papers, news articles, and discourse among people on social media. While important for…