Seeing is not always believing: Benchmarking Human and Model Perception of AI-Generated Images

TL;DR

This paper benchmarks human and AI capabilities in distinguishing real photos from AI-generated images, revealing humans struggle significantly while top AI detectors perform better, highlighting the need for improved fake image detection.

Contribution

It introduces a large-scale fake image dataset and benchmarks for human and AI detection capabilities, providing insights into current limitations and performance gaps.

Findings

Humans have a 38.7% misclassification rate in distinguishing real from AI-generated images.

Top AI detection models have a 13% failure rate under the same evaluation conditions.

The study raises awareness of risks associated with AI-generated fake images.

Abstract

Photos serve as a way for humans to record what they experience in their daily lives, and they are often regarded as trustworthy sources of information. However, there is a growing concern that the advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) technology may produce fake photos, which can create confusion and diminish trust in photographs. This study aims to comprehensively evaluate agents for distinguishing state-of-the-art AI-generated visual content. Our study benchmarks both human capability and cutting-edge fake image detection AI algorithms, using a newly collected large-scale fake image dataset Fake2M. In our human perception evaluation, titled HPBench, we discovered that humans struggle significantly to distinguish real photos from AI-generated ones, with a misclassification rate of 38.7%. Along with this, we conduct the model capability of AI-Generated images detection evaluation MPBench and the top-performing model from MPBench achieves a 13% failure rate under the same setting used in the human evaluation. We hope that our study can raise awareness of the potential risks of AI-generated images and facilitate further research to prevent the spread of false information. More information can refer to https://github.com/Inf-imagine/Sentry.