{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2026,5,20]],"date-time":"2026-05-20T23:09:32Z","timestamp":1779318572310,"version":"3.51.4"},"reference-count":51,"publisher":"MIT Press - Journals","issue":"2","content-domain":{"domain":[],"crossmark-restriction":false},"short-container-title":["Computational Linguistics"],"published-print":{"date-parts":[[2020,6]]},"abstract":"<jats:p> Recent developments in neural language models (LMs) have raised concerns about their potential misuse for automatically spreading misinformation. In light of these concerns, several studies have proposed to detect machine-generated fake news by capturing their stylistic differences from human-written text. These approaches, broadly termed stylometry, have found success in source attribution and misinformation detection in human-written texts. However, in this work, we show that stylometry is limited against machine-generated misinformation. Whereas humans speak differently when trying to deceive, LMs generate stylistically consistent text, regardless of underlying motive. Thus, though stylometry can successfully prevent impersonation by identifying text provenance, it fails to distinguish legitimate LM applications from those that introduce false information. We create two benchmarks demonstrating the stylistic similarity between malicious and legitimate uses of LMs, utilized in auto-completion and editing-assistance settings. <jats:sup>1<\/jats:sup> Our findings highlight the need for non-stylometry approaches in detecting machine-generated misinformation, and open up the discussion on the desired evaluation benchmarks. <\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.1162\/coli_a_00380","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2020,3,23]],"date-time":"2020-03-23T20:08:32Z","timestamp":1584994112000},"page":"499-510","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":67,"title":["The Limitations of Stylometry for Detecting Machine-Generated Fake                     News"],"prefix":"10.1162","volume":"46","author":[{"given":"Tal","family":"Schuster","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory,                         Massachusetts Institute of Technology."}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"given":"Roei","family":"Schuster","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Computer Science Department, Tel Aviv University, and Computer                         Science Department, Cornell Tech."}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"given":"Darsh J.","family":"Shah","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory,                         Massachusetts Institute of Technology."}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"given":"Regina","family":"Barzilay","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory,                         Massachusetts Institute of Technology."}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]}],"member":"281","reference":[{"key":"bib1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.4018\/978-1-5225-8431-5.ch004"},{"key":"bib2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1109\/SP.2012.34"},{"key":"bib3","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1109\/SP.2014.21"},{"key":"bib4","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.18653\/v1\/D19-1475"},{"key":"bib5","author":"Bakhtin Anton","year":"2019","journal-title":"arXiv preprint arXiv:1906.03351"},{"key":"bib7","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1002\/acp.1087"},{"key":"bib8","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/2382448.2382450"},{"key":"bib9","first-page":"255","volume-title":"24th USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security 15)","author":"Caliskan-Islam Aylin","year":"2015"},{"key":"bib10","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/1963405.1963500"},{"key":"bib11","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.18653\/v1\/P19-1419"},{"key":"bib12","author":"von Davier Matthias","year":"2019","journal-title":"arXiv preprint arXiv:1908.08594"},{"key":"bib13","volume-title":"Crime and Punishment","author":"Dostoyevsky Fyodor","year":"1866"},{"key":"bib14","first-page":"2281","volume-title":"International Speech Communication Association","author":"Enos Frank","year":"2007"},{"key":"bib15","first-page":"171","volume-title":"Proceedings of the 50th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Short Papers - Volume 2","author":"Feng Song","year":"2012"},{"key":"bib16","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1002\/9780470087923.hhs299"},{"key":"bib17","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.18653\/v1\/P19-3019"},{"key":"bib18","volume-title":"International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media","author":"Goswami Sumit","year":"2009"},{"key":"bib19","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1007\/978-3-319-13734-6_16"},{"key":"bib20","first-page":"1859","volume-title":"Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics","author":"Hanselowski Andreas","year":"2018"},{"key":"bib22","first-page":"3402","volume-title":"Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics","author":"Kochkina Elena","year":"2018"},{"key":"bib23","first-page":"354","volume-title":"AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence","author":"Liu Yang","year":"2018"},{"issue":"80","key":"bib24","first-page":"1","author":"Matsumoto David","year":"2011","journal-title":"FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin"},{"key":"bib25","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1509\/jmkr.45.6.633"},{"key":"bib26","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.3115\/1667583.1667679"},{"issue":"302","key":"bib27","first-page":"275","volume":"58","author":"Mosteller Frederick","year":"1963","journal-title":"Journal of the American Statistical Association"},{"key":"bib28","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.3115\/v1\/P14-1095"},{"key":"bib29","first-page":"86:1","volume":"50","author":"Neal Tempestt J.","year":"2017","journal-title":"ACM Computing Surveys"},{"key":"bib30","first-page":"309","volume-title":"Proceedings of the 49th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies","author":"Ott Myle","year":"2011"},{"key":"bib31","first-page":"3391","volume-title":"Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics","author":"P\u00e9rez-Rosas Ver\u00f3nica","year":"2018"},{"key":"bib32","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.18653\/v1\/W17-4213"},{"key":"bib33","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.18653\/v1\/D18-1003"},{"key":"bib34","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.18653\/v1\/P18-1022"},{"issue":"8","key":"bib35","volume":"1","author":"Radford Alec","year":"2019","journal-title":"OpenAI Blog"},{"key":"bib36","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.18653\/v1\/D17-1317"},{"key":"bib37","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1080\/00138388208598192"},{"key":"bib38","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.18653\/v1\/E17-2043"},{"key":"bib39","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.18653\/v1\/D19-1341"},{"key":"bib40","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/3137597.3137600"},{"key":"bib42","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.18653\/v1\/D19-1292"},{"key":"bib43","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.18653\/v1\/W18-5501"},{"key":"bib44","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.18653\/v1\/W17-2623"},{"key":"bib45","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/3184558.3188722"},{"key":"bib46","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1007\/BF00054024"},{"key":"bib47","first-page":"5998","volume-title":"Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems","author":"Vaswani Ashish","year":"2017"},{"key":"bib48","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.18653\/v1\/P17-2102"},{"key":"bib49","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1126\/science.aap9559"},{"key":"bib50","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.18653\/v1\/P17-2067"},{"key":"bib52","author":"Wolf Thomas","year":"2019","journal-title":"ArXiv"},{"key":"bib53","first-page":"9054","volume-title":"Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 32","author":"Zellers Rowan","year":"2019"},{"key":"bib54","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/2736277.2741637"},{"key":"bib55","author":"Zhou Xinyi","year":"2018","journal-title":"arXiv preprint arXiv:1812.00315"}],"container-title":["Computational Linguistics"],"original-title":[],"language":"en","link":[{"URL":"https:\/\/www.mitpressjournals.org\/doi\/pdf\/10.1162\/coli_a_00380","content-type":"unspecified","content-version":"vor","intended-application":"similarity-checking"}],"deposited":{"date-parts":[[2021,3,12]],"date-time":"2021-03-12T21:28:34Z","timestamp":1615584514000},"score":1,"resource":{"primary":{"URL":"https:\/\/direct.mit.edu\/coli\/article\/46\/2\/499-510\/93369"}},"subtitle":[],"short-title":[],"issued":{"date-parts":[[2020,6]]},"references-count":51,"journal-issue":{"issue":"2","published-print":{"date-parts":[[2020,6]]}},"alternative-id":["10.1162\/coli_a_00380"],"URL":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1162\/coli_a_00380","relation":{},"ISSN":["0891-2017","1530-9312"],"issn-type":[{"value":"0891-2017","type":"print"},{"value":"1530-9312","type":"electronic"}],"subject":[],"published":{"date-parts":[[2020,6]]}}}