Papers › Human vs. AI: A Novel Benchmark and a Comparative Study on the Detection of Generated...
Human vs. AI: A Novel Benchmark and a Comparative Study on the Detection of Generated Images and the Impact of Prompts
Philipp Moeßner, Heike Adel
With the advent of publicly available AI-based text-to-image systems, the process of creating photorealistic but fully synthetic images has been largely democratized. This can pose a threat to the public through a simplified spread of disinformation. Machine detectors and human media expertise can help to differentiate between AI-generated (fake) and real images and counteract this danger. Although AI generation models are highly prompt-dependent, the impact of the prompt on the fake detection performance has rarely been investigated yet. This work therefore examines the influence of the prompt's level of detail on the detectability of fake images, both with an AI detector and in a user study. For this purpose, we create a novel dataset, COCOXGEN, which consists of real photos from the COCO dataset as well as images generated with SDXL and Fooocus using prompts of two standardized lengths. Our user study with 200 participants shows that images generated with longer, more detailed prompts are detected significantly more easily than those generated with short prompts. Similarly, an AI-based detection model achieves better performance on images generated with longer prompts. However, humans and AI models seem to pay attention to different details, as we show in a heat map analysis.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Methods
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections