Designing Effective Digital Literacy Interventions for Boosting Deepfake Discernment
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Abstract (arXiv)
Deepfakes images can erode trust in institutions and compromise election outcomes, as people often struggle to discern real images from deepfake images. Improving digital literacy can help address these challenges. Here, we compare the efficacy of five digital literacy interventions to boost people's ability to discern deepfakes: (1) textual guidance on common indicators of deepfakes; (2) visual demonstrations of these indicators; (3) a gamified exercise for identifying deepfakes; (4) implicit learning through repeated exposure and feedback; and (5) explanations of how deepfakes are generated with the help of AI. We conducted an experiment with N=1,200 participants from the United States to test the immediate and long-term effectiveness of our interventions. Our results show that our lightweight, easy-to-understand interventions can boost deepfake image discernment by up to 13 percentage points while maintaining trust in real images.
Key facts. Cited by 1 paper in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 15 of its 117 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 31 Jul 2025.
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15 of 117 references.
References · 15
- 2022Detecting Deepfakes with Self-Blended Imagescited by 338
- 2021All That's 'Human' Is Not Gold: Evaluating Human Evaluation of Generated Textcited by 287
- 2020The Creation and Detection of Deepfakes: A Surveycited by 247
- 2018DeepFakes: a New Threat to Face Recognition? Assessment and Detectioncited by 209
- 2023Generative Language Models and Automated Influence Operations: Emerging Threats and Potential Mitigationscited by 158
- 2022Human heuristics for AI-generated language are flawedcited by 105
- 2023AI model GPT-3 (dis)informs us better than humanscited by 78
- 2021Deepfake Detection by Human Crowds, Machines, and Machine-informed Crowdscited by 58
- 2023A Representative Study on Human Detection of Artificially Generated Media Across Countriescited by 22
- 2022Human Detection of Political Speech Deepfakes across Transcripts, Audio, and Videocited by 16
- 2022Russian propaganda on social media during the 2022 invasion of Ukrainecited by 15
- 2025Labeling Messages as AI-Generated Does Not Reduce Their Persuasive Effectscited by 13
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