Negative bias in human cognitive judgment about AI-generated information and its underlying neural mechanisms

Abstract

Despite recent splendid advantages in artificial intelligence (AI), bad images of AI have not been removed from humans. This study investigates whether such bad images degrade human preference to AI-synthesized visual information independently of its appearance itself. To this end, experimental participants performed the attractiveness rating of various faces, synthesized by a generative adversarial network, under the fake instruction in which half of the faces were synthetic and the other half were real. This design enables to evaluate the effect of the participants’ belief itself on their attractiveness rating. The results show that the instruction of synthetic faces not only reduced attractiveness rating but also changed neural activation patterns in widespread cortical regions. This finding provides behavioral and neural evidence to support the notion that human preference to visual information is negatively biased depending solely on the belief about the information being AI-synthesized.