Sophie Nightingale-Examining people’s ability to identify real&fake visual media

Sophie Nightingale - Is this real? Examining people’s ability to identify real and fake visual media.

In recent decades society has seen incredible advances in digital technology, which has led to the wide availability of cheap and easy-to-use software for creating highly sophisticated fake visual content. Fake images and videos bring potential threats to society as they can be used for ill-intended purposes including, for example, non-consensual sexual imagery, fraud, and disinformation. The scope for misuse is reduced if people are able to distinguish between real and fake content—but can they? In this talk, I’ll describe my research examining this question in relation to a range of manipulation types, from using Photoshop to edit images through to use of artificial intelligence to synthesise faces of people who do not exist in the world.

Sophie is a Lecturer in Psychology at Lancaster University. She is a cognitive psychologist and her main interest is the intersection of technology with human cognition, particularly in security, legal, and forensic contexts. Her research draws on psychological and computational techniques to examine how emerging technologies enable increasingly sophisticated manipulation of content and the associated potential threats to society. Her work also aims to identify ways to improve the detection of such content. She previously completed her postdoc at the University of Berkeley, California and PhD at the University of Warwick.