MSU study dives deeper into how well AI can detect human deception

David Markowitz, associate professor of communication in the MSU College of Communication Arts and Sciences and lead author of the studyThis research aims to understand how well AI can aid in deception detection and simulate human data in social scientific research, as well as caution professionals when using large language models for lie detection."

To analyze the judgment of AI personas, the researchers used the Viewpoints AI research platform to assign audiovisual or audio-only media of humans for AI to judge. The AI judges were asked to determine if the human subject was lying or telling the truth and provide a rationale. Different variables were evaluated, such as media type (audiovisual or audio-only), contextual background (information or circumstances that help explain why something happens), lie-truth base-rates (proportions of honest and deceptive communication), and the persona of the AI (identities created to act and talk like real people) to see how AI's detection accuracy was impacted.

For example, one of the studies found that AI was lie-biased, as AI was much more accurate for lies (85.8%) compared to truths (19.5%). In short interrogation settings, AI's deception accuracy was comparable to humans. However, in a non-interrogation setting (e.g., when evaluating statements about friends), AI displayed a truth-bias, aligning more accurately to human performance. Generally, the results found that AI is more lie-biased and much less accurate than humans.

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Michigan State University

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