Understanding Individual and Team-based Human Factors in Detecting Deepfake Texts

In recent years, Natural Language Generation (NLG) techniques in AI (e.g., T5, GPT-3, ChatGPT) have shown a massive improvement and are now capable of generating human-like long coherent texts at scale, yielding so-called deepfake texts. This advancement, despite their benefits, can also cause security and privacy issues (e.g., plagiarism, identity obfuscation, disinformation attack). As such, it has become critically important to develop effective, practical, and scalable solutions to differentiate deepfake texts from human-written texts. Toward this challenge, in this work, we investigate how factors such as skill levels and collaborations impact how humans identify deepfake texts, studying three research questions: (1) do collaborative teams detect deepfake texts better than individuals? (2) do expert humans detect deepfake texts better than non-expert humans? (3) what are the factors that maximize the detection performance of humans? We implement these questions on two platforms: (1) non-expert humans or asynchronous teams on Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) and (2) expert humans or synchronous teams on the Upwork. By analyzing the detection performance and the factors that affected performance, some of our key findings are: (1) expert humans detect deepfake texts significantly better than non-expert humans, (2) synchronous teams on the Upwork detect deepfake texts significantly better than individuals, while asynchronous teams on the AMT detect deepfake texts weakly better than individuals, and (3) among various error categories, examining coherence and consistency in texts is useful in detecting deepfake texts. In conclusion, our work could inform the design of future tools/framework to improve collaborative human detection of deepfake texts.