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

Understand

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%.