Effects of Browsing Conditions and Visual Alert Design on Human Susceptibility to Deepfakes

Abstract

The increasing reach of deepfakes raises practical questions about people’s ability to detect false videos online. How vulnerable are people to deepfake videos? What technologies can help improve detection? Previous experiments that measure human deepfake detection historically omit a number of conditions that can exist in typical browsing conditions. Here, we operationalized four such conditions (low prevalence, brief presentation, low video quality, and divided attention), and found in a series of online experiments that all conditions lowered detection relative to baseline, suggesting that the current literature underestimates people’s susceptibility to deepfakes. Next, we examined how AI assistance could be integrated into the human decision process. We found that a model that exposes deepfakes by amplifying artifacts increases detection rates, and also leads to higher rates of incorporating AI feedback and higher final confidence than text-based prompts. Overall, this suggests that visual indicators that cause distortions on fake videos may be effective at mitigating the impact of falsified video.