Beyond Seeing Is Believing: On Crowdsourced Detection of Audiovisual Deepfakes

📅 2026-05-06
📈 Citations: 0
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📝 Abstract
Deepfakes are increasingly realistic and easy to produce, raising concerns about the reliability of human judgments in misinformation settings. We study audiovisual deepfake detection by measuring how consistently crowd workers distinguish authentic from manipulated videos and, when they flag a video as manipulated, how accurately they identify the manipulation type (audio-only, video-only, or audio-video) and how consistently they report manipulation timestamps. We run two matched crowdsourcing studies on Prolific using AV-Deepfake1M and the Trusted Media Challenge (TMC) dataset. We sample 48 videos per dataset (96 total) and collect 960 judgments (10 per video). Results show that crowd workers rarely misclassify authentic videos as manipulated, but they miss many manipulations, and agreement remains limited across videos. Aggregating multiple judgments per video stabilizes the authenticity signal, but it cannot recover manipulations that most workers consistently miss. Manipulation type identification is substantially noisier than authenticity detection even when workers detect a manipulation, with joint audio-video cases being particularly hard to recognize. Overall, these findings suggest that crowdsourcing can provide a scalable screening signal for audiovisual authenticity, while reliable modality attribution remains an open challenge.
Problem

Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.

audiovisual deepfakes
crowdsourced detection
manipulation type identification
deepfake authenticity
Innovation

Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.

audiovisual deepfakes
crowdsourced detection
manipulation type identification
modality attribution
authenticity screening
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Michael Soprano
Department of Mathematics, Computer Science and Physics, University of Udine, Udine, Friuli-Venezia Giulia, Italy
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Andrea Cioci
Department of Mathematics, Computer Science and Physics, University of Udine, Udine, Friuli-Venezia Giulia, Italy
Stefano Mizzaro
Stefano Mizzaro
Full professor of Computer Science and Information Technology
Information retrievalArtificial intelligenceHuman-in-the-loopMisinformation and fake news