Looks real, feels fake: conflict detection in deepfake videos

Abstract

We investigated whether people show signs of conflict detection in both more implicit and explicit judgments about the authenticity of short video clips depicting interviews with famous American actors. If so, they would be less confident when incorrectly seeing deepfakes as authentic than when correctly seeing authentic videos as authentic. Participants (N = 128; Mage = 33.7, SD = 12.1) from the USA were recruited on Prolific. Results showed that participants were more accurate at recognising deepfakes and less accurate at recognising authentic videos when they were explicitly asked to judge if a video was authentic or deepfake compared to more implicit authenticity judgments. Interestingly, they showed signs of conflict detection both when making more implicit and explicit authenticity judgments. These findings are relevant for the literature on both conflict detection in reasoning and decision-making and on deepfake recognition, as well as for research on training people to learn to recognise deepfakes.