AI-generated media has become a threat to our digital society as we know it.
These forgeries can be created automatically and on a large scale based on
publicly available technology. Recognizing this challenge, academics and
practitioners have proposed a multitude of automatic detection strategies to
detect such artificial media. However, in contrast to these technical advances,
the human perception of generated media has not been thoroughly studied yet.
In this paper, we aim at closing this research gap. We perform the first
comprehensive survey into people's ability to detect generated media, spanning
three countries (USA, Germany, and China) with 3,002 participants across audio,
image, and text media. Our results indicate that state-of-the-art forgeries are
almost indistinguishable from "real" media, with the majority of participants
simply guessing when asked to rate them as human- or machine-generated. In
addition, AI-generated media receive is voted more human like across all media
types and all countries. To further understand which factors influence people's
ability to detect generated media, we include personal variables, chosen based
on a literature review in the domains of deepfake and fake news research. In a
regression analysis, we found that generalized trust, cognitive reflection, and
self-reported familiarity with deepfakes significantly influence participant's
decision across all media categories.

AI 生成的媒体对我们所知的数字社会构成威胁。与技术进步相比，人们对生成媒体的感知尚未得到彻底研究。本文通过针对音频、图像和文本媒体跨三个国家（美国、德国和中国）的 3,002 位参与者进行全面的调查，结果显示，最先进的赝品几乎无法与 “真实” 媒体区分，大多数参与者在被要求评价时只是猜测它们是人工生成的还是机器生成的。此外，AI 生成的媒体在所有媒体类型和所有国家中更容易被误认为是人类产生的。为了进一步了解影响人们对生成媒体检测能力的因素，本文根据对 deepfake 和虚假新闻研究领域的文献综述，包括个人变量。通过回归分析，我们发现广义信任、认知反思和自报熟悉程度等个人变量显著影响参与者在所有媒体类别中的决策。