Investigating Memorization of Conspiracy Theories in Text Generation

Abstract: The adoption of natural language generation (NLG) models can leave individuals vulnerable to the generation of harmful information memorized by the models, such as conspiracy theories. While previous studies examine conspiracy theories in the context of social media, they have not evaluated their presence in the new space of generative LLMs. In this work, we investigate the capability of LLMs to generate conspiracy theory text. Specifically, we aim to answer: can we test pretrained generative LLMs for the memorization and elicitation of conspiracy theories without access to the model's training data? We highlight the difficulties of this task and discuss it in the context of memorization, generalization, and hallucination. Utilizing a new dataset consisting of conspiracy theory topics and machine-generated conspiracy theories helps us discover that many conspiracy theories are deeply rooted in the pretrained LLMs. Our experiments demonstrate a relationship between model parameters such as size and temperature and their propensity to generate conspiracy theory text. These results indicate the need for a more thorough review of NLG applications before release and an in-depth discussion of the drawbacks of memorization in generative LLMs.