TLDR
Computer-made videos of wars and disasters can look real enough to fool people. Current checking tools often miss them, especially after the videos are shared online.
Summary
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1 Study Aim
The authors aim to test how well detectors (tools that identify computer-made videos) recognize realistic crisis footage. They examine detector performance across video-making conditions, human judgments, and social dissemination (sharing through online networks). The study also asks whether existing methods remain reliable as video generators change. The study tests whether today’s checking tools can reliably spot realistic computer-made crisis videos.
2 Study Design
The researchers created RA-Bench, a benchmark (standard testing collection) containing 17,886 videos. It includes 1,830 real-video anchors across 10 social-risk categories and 16,056 clips from four open-source and five closed-source generators. They tested seven traditional detectors, 10 zero-shot multimodal models (systems used without task-specific training), and two MLLMs, or multimodal large language models, trained for video detection. They also assessed generation quality, conditioning information, sampling seeds (random starting settings), human authenticity judgments, and social dissemination. The researchers tested many checking tools against real and computer-made crisis videos, including videos changed and shared in different ways.
3 Findings
The study reveals that none of the three detector families generalizes consistently across RA-Bench. Generation properties affect detector families differently, while source-level detection patterns remain stable across sampling seeds. The authors find that videos misleading people are also difficult for detectors to identify. Social dissemination makes detection harder, reducing detector reliability after sharing. The findings demonstrate that current methods struggle with realistic AI-generated videos and support developing detectors robust to changing generators. Existing checking tools often fail on convincing computer-made videos, particularly after people share them online.