We live, it can seem, in a world where we can no longer trust our senses, with ‘deep fakes’ renegotiating our relationship with reality.  Take the above example of the AI-generated image showing an explosion near the Pentagon – this sent ripples through the stock market before it was quickly realised the image was a Fake.

In another recent example, the UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak appeared showing him pulling a sub-standard pint at a beer festival while a woman in the background looks on with a derisive expression. The image had been manipulated from an original photo in which Sunak appears to have pulled a pub-level pint while the person behind him has a neutral expression.  Again, this was quickly identified as a fake.

Are we fallible humans destined to be duped by increasingly sophisticated technology that means we can no longer separate fact from fiction, the authentic from the fake? The data certainly does not look great, with a number of studies suggesting that humans are not able to distinguish between real portraits and AI-synthesized faces. Fakes are a problem for all manner of criminal and unethical activity, with the United Nations calling AI-generated media a “serious and urgent” threat to information integrity, particularly on social media. In a recent report, the U.N. claimed the risk of disinformation online has “intensified” and singled out deepfakes in particular.

Given what we know about human psychology, to what extent are fakes renegotiating our relationship with reality? We suggest that while there clearly is a cause for concern, they also allow us to see reality in a different way and to understand about the world in new and different ways.

The psychology of fakes

The psychology literature about fakes tends to suggest that our brains can’t process all the information we see at once, which is why we often take a long time with games like Spot the Difference, or are befuddled by optical puzzles like the “Thatcher Illusion,” a seemingly normal image where Margaret Thatcher’s eyes and mouth are inverted.

Psychologist Dann Simons says that is because if we spotted everything, we’d be unable to focus our attention. This means our brain fails to log details it deems ­unimportant. When we flip back and forth trying to find them, we can’t because we never noticed them in the first place.

This chimes with research on inattentional blindness. In their classic experiment, Simon and Chabris show the way in which a person in a gorilla suit walking in a film sequence can be missed because the participants in the study were ‘primed’ to count the number of basketballs passes. Daniel Kahneman uses this as an example of how we can be ‘blind to the obvious’. On this basis the omens for humans do not look promising.

But what really is a fake?

But before we reach too gloomy a conclusion about humans and their deficiencies in spotting fakes, there is a definitional problem that needs addressing. When we consider something to be a fake then it infers we can make a distinction between the real and the fake. But are things really that simple? In fact there are many cases where this seemingly simple distinction starts to crumble on closer inspection. 

Take the issue of artwork – on the one hand a huge amount of money and resources are involved in establishing the authenticity of paintings, seeking confirmation that they were indeed created by the hand of the artist.  But at the same time, some artists such as Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst are open about the fact they have teams of people creating artworks for them – the prices they garner suggest that this does not in any way devalue their authenticity.

And if our brains can convince the body that a fake treatment is the real thing — the so-called placebo effect — and thus stimulate healing. Given that under the right conditions, a placebo can be just as effective as the ‘real’ treatments then can the fake really be a fake as we commonly understand it?

Social critic Rob Horning Suggests that what is real and what is fake is not always a straightforward process:

“That phrase implies that there is news out there that is not fake, that is entirely real, that is totally accurate. But nothing is totally accurate; everything is an approximation, and how close or far it is from the “truth” depends on where you are looking from and what you need to hear.”

All of this suggests that the notion of fake versus authentic is not quite as binary as it first appears: and not only that, but as we shall now see, perhaps at times people are even drawn to fakes.

We just baddies that’s smart with our money

A recent report in the Financial Times suggests that the trend for “dupes” has boomed in clothes, accessories and footwear.  As journalist Annachiara Biondi put it when talking about the way some young people tend to be attracted to these fake items, enjoying identities of people that are making a smart move:

“For most of them,…the real faux pas seems to be paying full price for authentic products when replicas, allegedly of comparable quality and at one-tenth of the cost, are just one click away.”

Similarly, cosmetic dermatology used to be shrouded in secrecy, but tell-all celebrities such as the Kardashians who openly talk about the procedures they have means that for many people there’s no longer any shame in owning up to the way they look being ‘fake’.

And this is nothing new when we look at religious relics, the practice of preserving and enshrining the remains of saints and heroes, or other items associated with their life or death, a practice that dates back well into the pre-Christian era in Europe. While today we perhaps might want some evidence of the authenticity of the relic, historians suggest that a medieval person may well not have been that bothered by a “fake” relic—as God is capable of imbuing anything with holiness. As art researcher Jennifer Freeman suggests:

“Relics… are shortcuts. They're visual mantras to focus the .. mind, a link between this world and the next.”

With all this we can see the way in which fakes are not necessarily always problematic for all concerned – they can offer a narrative and connection, a means by which we can locate meaning and focus our attention.

Back to memes

Our concern with fakes may distract us from what they offer those engaging with them – they help us to tell a story. A meme is typically not considered to be a factual document but instead is a rhetorical device. Rob Horning suggests that when something circulates within the context of “memes”, this specifies how it is supposed to consumed: as something made to mock somebody, make someone laugh, make a point and so on.

In the same way as many visual illusions work, we often enjoy the sensation of being momentarily tricked, imagine others being tricked and maybe experience a ‘what if’ moment. Reality is momentarily suspended and what we took to be true, the world as predictable, stable and knowable is one that has suddenly changed. This ‘liminality’ between what is real and what is not, where our disbelief is suspended, is something that we seek from stories, books, and films.

There is also something carnivalesque about this; medieval carnivals would mock the authorities at the time though ‘rituals of inversion”, with a king of fools or dancers costumed as priests and nuns.   During Saturnalia, a Roman pagan festival, masters had to wait on their slaves; carnival allowed peasants to impersonate kings.

So fakes are not strictly a means by which we separate fact from fiction but something we actively engage in, and how we work out what to understand about the world.

Buckets versus searchlights

Psychologist Teppo Felin suggests that A ‘bucket theory’ of perception reflects the information we collect about our environment as passive and automatic. We assimilate a world that exists independent of ourselves, and our limitations means we can fail to spot fakes. In contrast, a  ‘Searchlight theory’ of perception suggests that the way we make sense of the world is active, using guesses, theories, questions, and hypotheses, which means that the way we comprehend things is by directing perception and attention. On this basis we do not always see fakes, as we are looking in the wrong place, a type of misdirection perhaps.  

Hence in the gorilla experiment we could be asked to look at all manner of things from the hair colour of the actors to the gender and ethnic composition. Any of these are clear but only if you are looking for them and not something else. The fact that we miss something is not a function of blindness or bias, but an entirely rational and successful process given what we set out to do.

This helps us to understand fakes – we are expecting to see certain things and as such we fail to see the details that might flag them as suspicious (e.g. in AI generated themes it is often hands that fail to render very effectively). But that we see the world in one way and then we can suddenly see it another illuminates this process for us, we can suddenly see that way in which there is more than one way in which we can look at the world. Fakes therefore tell us something helpful about human perception that offers insights on this contested ground.

In conclusion

There a danger of fetishizing the ambiguity of fakes and the danger this represents – as with any way in which we operate and communicate it can be weaponised and used for nefarious purposes. But at the same time fakes may not deserve the degree moral panic that often seems to accompany them. There are many cases of institutions and individuals that appear to be legitimate and authentic but which have nevertheless wrecked damage. The case of Sarah Everard is a case in point – she was murdered by a serving police officer showing her his warrant card.

Fakes can be damaging that is clear and indeed they can be used to ‘epistemically pollute’ the environment. Once others know the cues that we use to determine how to respond to the information we receive, then we are vulnerable to being duped as others use these cues for influence.

But at the same time there is something interesting, subversive and challenging – they allow us to see reality in a different way, for what we understand about the world to be reconsidered. This can create an interesting space to then disrupt the normal fluency of processing and reconsider the world as we know it.  Which, for a behavioural scientist interested in making change happen, could well offer some untapped opportunities.