From Creation to Clarification: ChatGPT's Journey Through the Fake News Quagmire

The rampant spread of fake news has adversely affected society, resulting in extensive research on curbing its spread. As a notable milestone in large language models (LLMs), ChatGPT has gained significant attention due to its exceptional capabilities. In this study, we present an exploration of ChatGPT's proficiency in generating, explaining, and detecting fake news as follows.Generation -- We employ different prompt methods to generate fake news and prove the high quality of these instances through both self-assessment and human evaluation.Explanation -- We obtain nine features to characterize fake news based on ChatGPT's explanations and analyze the distribution of these factors across multiple public datasets.Detection -- We examine ChatGPT's capacity to identify fake news. We propose a reason-aware prompt method to improve its performance. We further probe into the potential extra information that could bolster its effectiveness in detecting fake news.