Digital literacy interventions can boost humans in discerning deepfakes

Authors: Dominique Geissler, Claire Robertson, Stefan Feuerriegel

Published: 2025-07-31 12:23:45+00:00

AI Summary

The research investigates the effectiveness of five digital literacy interventions in improving people's ability to discern deepfakes. The study found that textual and visual interventions significantly boosted deepfake discernment without reducing trust in real images, although the effect was not entirely sustained long-term.

Abstract

Deepfakes, i.e., images generated by artificial intelligence (AI), can erode trust in institutions and compromise election outcomes, as people often struggle to discern real images from deepfakes. Improving digital literacy can help address these challenges, yet scalable and effective approaches remain largely unexplored. 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 interventions can boost deepfake discernment by up to 13 percentage points while maintaining trust in real images. Altogether, our approach is scalable, suitable for diverse populations, and highly effective for boosting deepfake detection while maintaining trust in truthful information.