Understanding Human Reasoning & Sensegiving About AI-Generated Images & Video
How humans decide what’s real in a world of AI-generated images and video
Workshop Overview
AI-generated media, such as synthetic video and deepfakes, are advancing rapidly. As the line between reality and fabrication blurs, we face critical questions about digital literacy, trust, and the cognitive processes that shape our shared culture.
While technical detection models continue to evolve, human detection remains unreliable, and the social effects of these technologies are largely unknown. This ambiguity fuels misunderstandings, misinformation, disinformation, and political polarization.
This workshop moves beyond the technical challenge of detection to explore the human side of synthetic media. We invite researchers, designers, educators, psychologists, cognitive scientists, and media practitioners to investigate how social interaction and collective sensemaking shape our evaluation of AI-generated (or suspected AI-generated) media.
Theoretical Framework
We will explore these challenges through two specific lenses:
- Sensemaking: How individuals and groups construct meaning and understand their reality in an era of deepfakes. (Weik, 1995; Urquhart et al., 2020)
- Sensegiving: The process of attempting to influence the meaning construction of others toward a preferred redefinition of reality. (Gioia & Kumar, 1991; Robert & Ola, 2021)
Core Questions
Our session will be guided by three primary lines of inquiry:
- Individual Reasoning: How are people making sense of what they encounter in online spaces?
- Influence & Persuasion: How does that sense-making shape sensegiving?
- Collective Judgment: How do group dynamics shape these judgments?
Workshop Structure & Agenda
This half-day workshop is designed to be highly interactive, split into two distinct parts:
Part 1: Hands-on Exploration Participants will engage in hands-on activities using a curated set of AI and non-AI images and videos. Through think-aloud sessions and group reflection exercises, we will surface the mental models, heuristics, and biases that drive judgments. We aim to understand when and why a participant accepts a “preferred redefinition of reality” presented by a media artifact.
Part 2: Research Presentation & Synthesis Contributors will present their submitted work, explicitly relating their findings to the workshop’s themes and activities. All submitted works will be archived in the ACM Digital Library or the Adjunct Proceedings.
Topics of Interest
We are actively seeking contributions that support new frameworks for understanding human–AI interaction. Key areas of interest include:
- Cognitive Frameworks: Emerging research on synthetic media cognition and detection literacy.
- Interventions: Developing prototypes for media literacy and critical analysis.
- Societal Impact: Inclusive, multidisciplinary perspectives on trust, misinformation, and political polarization.
- Accessibility: How diverse populations navigate and access synthetic realities.
