arXiv AI By Kwangsuk Park, JiWoong Yang, Vaniushkina Kseniia

What Breaks When Facts Become Stories? The Distortions Source-Agreement Metrics Miss When Models Retell Real Events

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The paper investigates how language models transform factual news into narrative stories, revealing that standard source‑agreement metrics misjudge the quality of these retellings. By having three model families rewrite 2,000 news articles as summaries and as stories, the authors measured changes across the five Ws and identified distortions—especially in place, causation, and accountability—that are often overlooked by fact‑checking. They found that stories tend to lose critical contextual details while amplifying accountability distortions, which can shift blame and remain undetected by conventional checks.

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