Not only is it not good, I’d dare to say it’s awful. Never mind that the headlines themselves are terribly crafted: the entire point is that one has to be critical of sources, and not take everything at face value just because it sounds somewhat convincing. It’s not about blatantly discrediting things at face value because they don’t fit what you believed to be true.

By the standards of this test, headlines such as “The CIA Subjected African-Amercians to LSD for 77 Consecutive Days in Experiment” would clearly belong in the fake news category. And if it’s supposed to test whether the (presumably American) respondent has decent insight into the realities of contemporary politics, why in the world would it include something as obscure as “Morocco’s King Appoints Committee Chief to Fight Poverty and Inequality”. There’s literally no way of knowing without context whether the associated article would be propaganda or just an obscure piece of foreign correspondence. Many of the “true” headlines are still things one shouldn’t take for granted without checking sources, and many of the “fake” ones are cartoonish.

It’s just bad research.

Edit: Rather than bad research, it seems it might be badly misrepresented. The paper itself appears completely different from what is reported in the linked article. I’m still, however, not entirely convinced by the approach using AI generated headlines.