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Main Authors: Poletti, Silvia, Ilyes, Justin, Hasenbalg, Marcel, Fischinger, David, Boyer, Martin
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.06143
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author Poletti, Silvia
Ilyes, Justin
Hasenbalg, Marcel
Fischinger, David
Boyer, Martin
author_facet Poletti, Silvia
Ilyes, Justin
Hasenbalg, Marcel
Fischinger, David
Boyer, Martin
contents The misuse of generative AI in online disinformation campaigns highlights the urgent need for transparent and explainable detection systems. In this work, we investigate how detectors for AI-generated images can be more effective in providing human-understandable explanations for their predictions. To this end, we develop a suite of detectors with various architectures and fine-tuning strategies, trained on our large-scale photorealistic fake image dataset, AIText2Image, and assess their performance on state-of-the-art text-to-image AI generators. We integrate 16 different explainable AI (XAI) methods into our detection framework, and the visual explanations are comprehensively refined and evaluated through a novel approach that prioritizes human understanding of AI-generated images, using both textual and visual responses collected from a survey of 100 participants. This framework offers insights into visual-language cues in fake image detection and into the clarity of XAI methods from a human perspective, measuring the alignment of XAI outputs with human preferences.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_06143
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle AI-Generated Images: What Humans and Machines See When They Look at the Same Image
Poletti, Silvia
Ilyes, Justin
Hasenbalg, Marcel
Fischinger, David
Boyer, Martin
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
The misuse of generative AI in online disinformation campaigns highlights the urgent need for transparent and explainable detection systems. In this work, we investigate how detectors for AI-generated images can be more effective in providing human-understandable explanations for their predictions. To this end, we develop a suite of detectors with various architectures and fine-tuning strategies, trained on our large-scale photorealistic fake image dataset, AIText2Image, and assess their performance on state-of-the-art text-to-image AI generators. We integrate 16 different explainable AI (XAI) methods into our detection framework, and the visual explanations are comprehensively refined and evaluated through a novel approach that prioritizes human understanding of AI-generated images, using both textual and visual responses collected from a survey of 100 participants. This framework offers insights into visual-language cues in fake image detection and into the clarity of XAI methods from a human perspective, measuring the alignment of XAI outputs with human preferences.
title AI-Generated Images: What Humans and Machines See When They Look at the Same Image
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.06143