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AI Propaganda: Who Can Tell?

CSEF · 2026 Cognitive Science (Junior Division)

Nicholas Profumo

Overview

The idea behind this project was to see if age makes a difference in people's ability to tell if images are AI generated. I made a survey with five AI generated images and five real images, and I asked respondents if they thought that these were AI generated or not. I managed to get around 240 respondents from a variety of age groups with the age ranging from 12 to 79 years old. In the end, there was a significant drop in score with age, showing that younger people are more able to distinguish AI from non-AI images. The probability of no correlation between age and score was basically zero (p-value of of 2 x 10^-16 ). Additionally, I tested popular AIs, and they got similar results to the human participants.

Competition history

  • CSEF 2026 Cognitive Science (Junior Division) · Entry J-06-13

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