The Key to Spotting Deepfakes is Deliberately Slowing Down
In his book,
If an elected official does something that causes you to feel outrage, you need to organize and vote them out, for example. If another person does something offensive, you have a legal system designed to investigate and uncover the truth. If someone is spreading misinformation, the speed at which that information is spread plays a considerable role in whether there’s enough time to get the truth out.
Unfortunately, we live in an age that doesn’t allow anything to be done slowly and deliberately. Which is why I was intrigued by this finding in a study about spotting deepfakes:
When Put to the Test, Are We Any Good at Spotting AI Fakes?
Perhaps unsurprisingly, longer viewing times also increased accuracy. But the magnitude of the increase was impressive: with one second of display time, participants were accurate 72 percent of the time for AI images; at five seconds, accuracy increased to 77 percent, and at ten seconds, to 80 percent.
In a second, most people can spot obvious AI distortions. Given a few more seconds, we get even better at it. Slowing down to look at it instead of immediately reacting impacts our ability to spot falsehoods.
I would argue that the same goes for everything we see online. But, as Tobias writes in his book, that’s not the way social media works. It rewards immediate, outraged reactions. It invites us to spend less than a second looking at an image, a headline, or a post, and react accordingly. This only increases the likelihood that fake images, videos, and information will get spread. The more outrageous, the better. The purveyours of bullshit know this. They count on it, and they are winning the battle not just for social media, but across society as a whole.
The next time you want to hit the like or share button, stop. Take a minute to consider what your actions are doing to make the timeline for everyone who follows you a little worse. We will not see any change so long as we continue to reward this crap with our attention and immediate reactions.
Slow down. As much as society tells us not to, you need to.
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