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Perception vs. Reality: Understanding and Evaluating the Impact of Synthetic Image Deepfakes over College Students

Artificial Intelligence (AI)-powered Deepfakes are responsible for new challenges in consumers’ visual experience, and pose a wide range of negative consequences (i.e., non-consensual intimate imagery, political dis/misinformation, financial fraud, and cybersecurity issues) for individuals, societies, and organizations. Research suggested legislation, corporate policies, anti-Deepfake technology, education, and training to combat Deepfakes including the usage of synthetic media to raise awareness so that people can become more critical in detection when evaluating these contents in the future. To educate and raise awareness among the college-going students, this pilot survey study utilized both synthetic and real images over undergraduate students (N=19) to understand the human cognition and perception demonstrated by the literate population in detecting Deepfake media with their bare eyes. The results showed that human cognition and perception are insufficient in detecting synthetic media with their inexperienced eyes and even the intelligent population is vulnerable to this technology. While Deepfakes are becoming sophisticated and imperceptible, it was observed that this kind of survey study can be beneficial in raising awareness among the population about the societal impact of the technology and may also improve their detection ability for future encounters.