A Report on AI Content Detection & Reality

A national survey on our ability to identity what's real

ZINE commissioned YouGov to survey over a thousand Americans about their encounters with suspicious online material. The kind where you just can’t tell if something’s created by AI or not. Is this... legitimate?

The upside of our bottom-up media environment is that anyone can contribute. The downside is that anyone can contribute. Sifting for truth amidst slop, noise, propaganda and nonsense is now Sisyphean. How are we coping – or, rather, reporting on how we’re coping?

In our research we examined how often people come across questionable content, their confidence in detecting AI-generated material, and ultimately, what they do when they come across material they’re unsure of.

What we found says less about AI than it does about how people report their relationship to reality.

More than half (61%) of Americans report they come across content they can’t tell is AI or not multiple times a week.

Nearly 33% of Americans are unsure about content on a daily basis.

Uncertainty is now routine.