Seeing Is Not Believing: Realistic AI Videos Disrupt Confidence in Real Videos
The rise of realistic AI-generated videos is disrupting people's confidence in real videos, even when the synthetic content is clearly disclosed. A recent study found that participants who were exposed to AI-generated videos were more likely to doubt the authenticity of subsequent human-generated videos. This suggests that the effects of AI-generated content on perception and psychology are more complex than previously thought.
- ▪Generative video models can produce synthetic footage that closely resembles real-world scenes.
- ▪Exposure to AI-generated videos can increase doubt about the authenticity of subsequent human-generated videos.
- ▪The effects of AI-generated content on perception and psychology can occur even when the content is clearly disclosed.
Hacker News (AI / LLM) files mainly under ai. We currently carry 3,280 of its stories.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
inspect →
Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | MIT Media Lab |
| Canonical URL | https://www.media.mit.edu/publications/seeing-is-not-believing/ |
| Publication time | Fri, 24 Jul 2026 03:39:37 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-07-24T03:46:10.304Z |
| Last seen | 2026-07-24T03:46:10.304Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | Hb1jw-QojWLV |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Abstract Visual media has long served as a reference for what feels real, but generative video models now produce synthetic footage closely resembling real-world scenes. Such media increasingly appears in short-form social feeds, where AI-generated and human-generated videos are consumed in rapid succession. While prior work has focused on detecting synthetic content, less is known about how exposure to such content shapes perception of subsequent human- generated media. We conducted a two-phase study (𝑁 = 100), comparing participants first exposed to AI-generated videos to a control group viewing human-generated videos, before both groups transitioned to human-generated content.
…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at MIT Media Lab.
Discussion
0 commentsMore from MIT Media Lab
