Human detection of political speech deepfakes across transcripts, audio, and video

Recent advances in technology for hyper-realistic visual and audio effects provoke the concern that deepfake videos of political speeches will soon be indistinguishable from authentic video. We conduct 5 pre-registered randomized experiments with N = 2215 participants to evaluate how accurately humans distinguish real political speeches from fabrications across base rates of misinformation, audio sources, question framings with and without priming, and media modalities. We do not find base rates of misinformation have statistically significant effects on discernment. We find deepfakes with audio produced by the state-of-the-art text-to-speech algorithms are harder to discern than the same deepfakes with voice actor audio. Moreover across all experiments and question framings, we find audio and visual information enables more accurate discernment than text alone: human discernment relies more on how something is said, the audio-visual cues, than what is said, the speech content. With advances in generative AI, political speech deepfakes are becoming more realistic. Here, the authors show that people's ability to distinguish between real and fake speeches relies on audio and visual information more than the speech content.