Exposing Pink Slime Journalism: Linguistic Signatures and Robust Detection against LLM-Generated Threats

Sadat Shahriar, Navid Ayoobi, Arjun Mukherjee, Mostafa Musharrat, Sai Vishnu Vamsi Senagasetty


Abstract
The local news landscape, a vital source of reliable information for 28 million Americans, faces a growing threat from Pink Slime Journalism, a low-quality, auto-generated articles that mimic legitimate local reporting. Detecting these deceptive articles requires a fine-grained analysis of their linguistic, stylistic, and lexical characteristics. In this work, we conduct a comprehensive study to uncover the distinguishing patterns of Pink Slime content and propose detection strategies based on these insights. Beyond traditional generation methods, we highlight a new adversarial vector: modifications through large language models (LLMs). Our findings reveal that even consumer-accessible LLMs can significantly undermine existing detection systems, reducing their performance by up to 40% in F1-score. To counter this threat, we introduce a robust learning framework specifically designed to resist LLM-based adversarial attacks and adapt to the evolving landscape of automated pink slime journalism, and showed and improvement by up to 27%.
Anthology ID:
2025.ranlp-1.128
Volume:
Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing - Natural Language Processing in the Generative AI Era
Month:
September
Year:
2025
Address:
Varna, Bulgaria
Editors:
Galia Angelova, Maria Kunilovskaya, Marie Escribe, Ruslan Mitkov
Venue:
RANLP
SIG:
Publisher:
INCOMA Ltd., Shoumen, Bulgaria
Note:
Pages:
1109–1117
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.ranlp-1.128/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Sadat Shahriar, Navid Ayoobi, Arjun Mukherjee, Mostafa Musharrat, and Sai Vishnu Vamsi Senagasetty. 2025. Exposing Pink Slime Journalism: Linguistic Signatures and Robust Detection against LLM-Generated Threats. In Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing - Natural Language Processing in the Generative AI Era, pages 1109–1117, Varna, Bulgaria. INCOMA Ltd., Shoumen, Bulgaria.
Cite (Informal):
Exposing Pink Slime Journalism: Linguistic Signatures and Robust Detection against LLM-Generated Threats (Shahriar et al., RANLP 2025)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.ranlp-1.128.pdf