Can we spot fake public comments generated by ChatGPT(-3.5, -4)?: Japanese stylometric analysis expose emulation created by one-shot learning

• Published in: PloS one 2024-03, Vol.19 (3), p.e0299031-e0299031
• Main Authors: Zaitsu, Wataru, Jin, Mingzhe, Ishihara, Shunichi, Tsuge, Satoru, Inaba, Mitsuyuki
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Biology and Life Sciences; Computer and Information Sciences; Physical Sciences; Research and Analysis Methods; Social Sciences
• ISSN: 1932-6203; 1932-6203
• DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0299031

Public comments are an important opinion for civic when the government establishes rules. However, recent AI can easily generate large quantities of disinformation, including fake public comments. We attempted to distinguish between human public comments and ChatGPT-generated public comments (including ChatGPT emulated that of humans) using Japanese stylometric analysis. Study 1 conducted multidimensional scaling (MDS) to compare 500 texts of five classes: Human public comments, GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 generated public comments only by presenting the titles of human public comments (i.e., zero-shot learning, GPTzero), GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 emulated by presenting sentences of human public comments and instructing to emulate that (i.e., one-shot learning, GPTone). The MDS results showed that the Japanese stylometric features of the public comments were completely different from those of the GPTzero-generated texts. Moreover, GPTone-generated public comments were closer to those of humans than those generated by GPTzero. In Study 2, the performance levels of the random forest (RF) classifier for distinguishing three classes (human, GPTzero, and GPTone texts). RF classifiers showed the best precision for the human public comments of approximately 90%, and the best precision for the fake public comments generated by GPT (GPTzero and GPTone) was 99.5% by focusing on integrated next writing style features: phrase patterns, parts-of-speech (POS) bigram and trigram, and function words. Therefore, the current study concluded that we could discriminate between GPT-generated fake public comments and those written by humans at the present time.