The DOI matches its Crossref record; 16 of the 16 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Is ChatGPT a friend or foe in the war on misinformation?: A South African perspective
Open accessAbstract
The release of ChatGPT at the end of 2022 met with fears and optimism. One particularly important avenue of research that is emerging revolves around ChatGPT's ability to provide accurate and unbiased information on a variety of topics. Given the interest that Google and Microsoft have shown in similar technologies, it is likely that Large Language Models such as ChatGPT could become new gateways to information, and if this is the case, what kind of information this technology provides needs to be investigated. The current study examines the usefulness of ChatGPT as a source of information in a South African context by first investigating ChatGPT's responses to ten South African conspiracy theories in terms of truthfulness, before employing bias classification as well as sentiment analysis to evaluate whether ChatGPT exhibits bias when presenting eight South African political topics. We found that, overall, ChatGPT did not spread conspiracy theories. However, the tool generated falsehoods around one conspiracy theory and generally presented a left bias, albeit not to the extreme. Sentiment analysis showed that ChatGPT's responses were mostly neutral and, when more emotive, were more often positive than negative. The implications of the findings for academics and students are discussed, as are a number of recommendations for future research.
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“While ChatGPT did not actively propagate South African conspiracy theories and generally produced accurate information”
From Generative AI and misinformation: a scoping review of the role of generative AI in the generation, detection, mitigation, and impact of misinformation (2026) · cites this paper as Senekal and Brokensha 2023
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“The study also observed a left-leaning political bias in ChatGPT's responses to politically sensitive prompts”
From Generative AI and misinformation: a scoping review of the role of generative AI in the generation, detection, mitigation, and impact of misinformation (2026) · cites this paper as Senekal and Brokensha 2023
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“it reproduced one specific misinformation by falsely claiming that Hamilton Naki assisted in the world's first human heart transplant.”
From Generative AI and misinformation: a scoping review of the role of generative AI in the generation, detection, mitigation, and impact of misinformation (2026) · cites this paper as Senekal and Brokensha 2023
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“While ChatGPT generally provided accurate 'no' responses to most conspiracy theories, correctly rejecting the false claims, it failed to detect one conspiracy theory.”
From Generative AI and misinformation: a scoping review of the role of generative AI in the generation, detection, mitigation, and impact of misinformation (2026) · cites this paper as Senekal and Brokensha 2023
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Cites
Language Models are Few-Shot Learners
Brown, T. B., Mann, B., Ryder, N., Subbiah, M., Kaplan, J., Dhariwal, P., Neelakantan, A., Shyam, P., Sastry, G., Askell, A., et al. (2020) · arXiv · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2005.14165 · Cited by 23,372
Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback
Ouyang, L., Wu, J., Jiang, X., Almeida, D., Wainwright, C. L., Mishkin, P., Zhang, C., Agarwal, S., Slama, K., Ray, A., et al. (2022) · arXiv · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2203.02155 · Cited by 4,208
Understanding Conspiracy Theories
Douglas, K. M., Uscinski, J. E., Sutton, R. M., Cichocka, A., Nefes, T., Ang, C. S., & Deravi, F. (2019) · Political Psychology · doi:10.1111/pops.12568 · Cited by 1,511 · cited 6×
“Mahl, Schäfer and Zeng’s (2022) and Douglas et al.’s (2019) conceptualisations of conspiracy theories were used as a theoretical lens to identify South African conspiracy theories, while Sallam et al.’s (2023) methodology (outlined later) was adapted to score our dataset according to (1)…”
BackgroundMethodInfluentialGao, C. A., Howard, F. M., Markov, N. S., Dyer, E. C., Ramesh, S., Luo, Y., & Pearson, A. T. (2022) · doi:10.1101/2022.12.23.521610 · Cited by 1,099 · cited 1×
“5 model (Zhou et al., 2023) and has been trained with 175 billion parameters (Gao et al., 2022; Gilson et al., 2022; Hughes, 2023; Zhou et al., 2023).”
MethodChatGPT: Jack of all trades, master of none
Kocoń, J., Cichecki, I., Kaszyca, O., Kochanek, M., Szydło, D., Baran, J., Bielaniewicz, J., Gruza, M., Janz, A., Kanclerz, K., et al. (2023) · Information Fusion · doi:10.1016/j.inffus.2023.101861 · Cited by 758
Fuchs, K. (2023) · Frontiers in Education · doi:10.3389/feduc.2023.1166682 · Cited by 353 · cited 1×
“Students in particular need to be sensitised to this problem to avoid over-reliance on information that in turn may reduce the development of their critical and analytical thinking skills (cf. Fuchs, 2023).”
BackgroundBang, Y., Cahyawijaya, S., Lee, N., Dai, W., Su, D., Wilie, B., Lovenia, H., Ji, Z., Yu, T., Chung, W., et al. (2023) · arXiv · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2302.04023 · Cited by 337 · cited 3×
“As discussed in the literature review on LLMs, a significant drawback of using these networks is that they may generate false information (Lin, Hilton & Evans, 2021), and ChatGPT is no exception (Bang et al., 2023; Guo et al., 2023).”
BackgroundMore human than human: measuring ChatGPT political bias
Motoki, F., Pinho Neto, V., & Rodrigues, V. (2024) · Public Choice · doi:10.1007/s11127-023-01097-2 · Cited by 329
The Political Biases of ChatGPT
Rozado, D. (2023) · Social Sciences · doi:10.3390/socsci12030148 · Cited by 281
Engineering Education in the Era of ChatGPT: Promise and Pitfalls of Generative AI for Education
Qadir, J. (2022) · doi:10.36227/techrxiv.21789434.v1 · Cited by 264
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Sorted by citations
Park, S., & Nan, X. (2026) · AI & SOCIETY · doi:10.1007/s00146-025-02620-3 · Cited by 58
“Senekal and Brokensha (2023) investigated ChatGPT’s potential to generate misinformation by examining its responses to ten South African conspiracy theories.”
Influential
Metadata
- Authors
- Senekal, B., & Brokensha, S.
- Affiliations
- University of the Free State (ZA)
- Venue
- Communicare: Journal for Communication Studies in Africa
- Publisher
- University of Johannesburg
- Published
- 2023-12-09
- Volume
- 42
- Issue
- 2
- Pages
- 3-16
- ISSN
- 0259-0069 (ISSN-L)
- 2957-7950
- OpenAlex
- W4389515659
- Cited by
- 7
- References
- 16
- Citations by year
- 2026: 1 · 2025: 3 · 2024: 3
- FWCI
- 3.01
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- diamond
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- Communicare Journal for Communication Studies in Africa (publishedVersion, cc-by-nc)
- DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Misinformation and Its Impacts
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Ethics and Social Impacts of AI
- Social Sciences › Communication › Public Relations and Crisis Communication
- Keywords
- ChatGPT, large language models, misinformation, conspiracy theories, honesty, political bias, sentiment analysis, South African politics, information sources, AI-generated information
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