Artifact magnification on deepfake videos increases human detection and subjective confidence

The development of technologies for easily and automatically falsifying video has raised practical questions about people's ability to detect false information online. How vulnerable are people to deepfake videos? What technologies can be applied to boost their performance? Human susceptibility to deepfake videos is typically measured in laboratory settings, which do not reflect the challenges of real-world browsing. In typical browsing, deepfakes are rare, engagement with the video may be short, participants may be distracted, or the video streaming quality may be degraded. Here, we tested deepfake detection under these ecological viewing conditions, and found that detection was lowered in all cases. Principles from signal detection theory indicated that different viewing conditions affected different dimensions of detection performance. Overall, this suggests that the current literature underestimates people's susceptibility to deepfakes. Next, we examined how computer vision models might be integrated into users' decision process to increase accuracy and confidence during deepfake detection. We evaluated the effectiveness of communicating the model's prediction to the user by amplifying artifacts in fake videos. We found that artifact amplification was highly effective at making fake video distinguishable from real, in a manner that was robust across viewing conditions. Additionally, compared to a traditional text-based prompt, artifact amplification was more convincing: people accepted the model's suggestion more often, and reported higher final confidence in their model-supported decision, particularly for more challenging videos. Overall, this suggests that visual indicators that cause distortions on fake videos may be highly effective at mitigating the impact of falsified video.