Human-AI Ensembles Improve Deepfake Detection in Low-to-Medium Quality Videos

Deepfake detection is widely framed as a machine learning problem, yet how humans and AI detectors compare under realistic conditions remains poorly understood. We evaluate 200 human participants and 95 state-of-the-art AI detectors across two datasets: DF40, a standard benchmark, and CharadesDF, a novel dataset of videos of everyday activities. CharadesDF was recorded using mobile phones leading to low/moderate quality videos compared to the more professionally captured DF40. Humans outperform AI detectors on both datasets, with the gap widening in the case of CharadesDF where AI accuracy collapses to near chance (0.537) while humans maintain robust performance (0.784). Human and AI errors are complementary: humans miss high-quality deepfakes while AI detectors flag authentic videos as fake, and hybrid human-AI ensembles reduce high-confidence errors. These findings suggest that effective real-world deepfake detection, especially in non-professionally produced videos, requires human-AI collaboration rather than AI algorithms alone.

Context and Transcripts Improve Detection of Deepfake Audios of Public Figures

Humans use context to assess the veracity of information. However, current audio deepfake detectors only analyze the audio file without considering either context or transcripts. We create and analyze a Journalist-provided Deepfake Dataset (JDD) of 255 public deepfakes which were primarily contributed by over 70 journalists since early 2024. We also generate a synthetic audio dataset (SYN) of dead public figures and propose a novel Context-based Audio Deepfake Detector (CADD) architecture. In addition, we evaluate performance on two large-scale datasets: ITW and P$^2$V. We show that sufficient context and/or the transcript can significantly improve the efficacy of audio deepfake detectors. Performance (measured via F1 score, AUC, and EER) of multiple baseline audio deepfake detectors and traditional classifiers can be improved by 5%-37.58% in F1-score, 3.77%-42.79% in AUC, and 6.17%-47.83% in EER. We additionally show that CADD, via its use of context and/or transcripts, is more robust to 5 adversarial evasion strategies, limiting performance degradation to an average of just -0.71% across all experiments. Code, models, and datasets are available at our project page: https://sites.northwestern.edu/nsail/cadd-context-based-audio-deepfake-detection (access restricted during review).