As Good As A Coin Toss: Human detection of AI-generated images, videos, audio, and audiovisual stimuli

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Cooke, Di, Edwards, Abigail, Barkoff, Sophia, Kelly, Kathryn
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Cooke, Di
Edwards, Abigail
Barkoff, Sophia
Kelly, Kathryn
author_facet Cooke, Di
Edwards, Abigail
Barkoff, Sophia
Kelly, Kathryn
contents One of the current principal defenses against weaponized synthetic media continues to be the ability of the targeted individual to visually or auditorily recognize AI-generated content when they encounter it. However, as the realism of synthetic media continues to rapidly improve, it is vital to have an accurate understanding of just how susceptible people currently are to potentially being misled by convincing but false AI generated content. We conducted a perceptual study with 1276 participants to assess how capable people were at distinguishing between authentic and synthetic images, audio, video, and audiovisual media. We find that on average, people struggled to distinguish between synthetic and authentic media, with the mean detection performance close to a chance level performance of 50%. We also find that accuracy rates worsen when the stimuli contain any degree of synthetic content, features foreign languages, and the media type is a single modality. People are also less accurate at identifying synthetic images when they feature human faces, and when audiovisual stimuli have heterogeneous authenticity. Finally, we find that higher degrees of prior knowledgeability about synthetic media does not significantly impact detection accuracy rates, but age does, with older individuals performing worse than their younger counterparts. Collectively, these results highlight that it is no longer feasible to rely on the perceptual capabilities of people to protect themselves against the growing threat of weaponized synthetic media, and that the need for alternative countermeasures is more critical than ever before.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2403_16760
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle As Good As A Coin Toss: Human detection of AI-generated images, videos, audio, and audiovisual stimuli
Cooke, Di
Edwards, Abigail
Barkoff, Sophia
Kelly, Kathryn
Human-Computer Interaction
Artificial Intelligence
Sound
Audio and Speech Processing
68T01
I.2
One of the current principal defenses against weaponized synthetic media continues to be the ability of the targeted individual to visually or auditorily recognize AI-generated content when they encounter it. However, as the realism of synthetic media continues to rapidly improve, it is vital to have an accurate understanding of just how susceptible people currently are to potentially being misled by convincing but false AI generated content. We conducted a perceptual study with 1276 participants to assess how capable people were at distinguishing between authentic and synthetic images, audio, video, and audiovisual media. We find that on average, people struggled to distinguish between synthetic and authentic media, with the mean detection performance close to a chance level performance of 50%. We also find that accuracy rates worsen when the stimuli contain any degree of synthetic content, features foreign languages, and the media type is a single modality. People are also less accurate at identifying synthetic images when they feature human faces, and when audiovisual stimuli have heterogeneous authenticity. Finally, we find that higher degrees of prior knowledgeability about synthetic media does not significantly impact detection accuracy rates, but age does, with older individuals performing worse than their younger counterparts. Collectively, these results highlight that it is no longer feasible to rely on the perceptual capabilities of people to protect themselves against the growing threat of weaponized synthetic media, and that the need for alternative countermeasures is more critical than ever before.
title As Good As A Coin Toss: Human detection of AI-generated images, videos, audio, and audiovisual stimuli
topic Human-Computer Interaction
Artificial Intelligence
Sound
Audio and Speech Processing
68T01
I.2
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.16760