Enhancing Image Comprehension: The Impact of AI-Generated Explanations on Perception of Altered and Synthetic Media

In the digital era, the exponential growth of images and videos on social platforms has transformed how individuals perceive information and form opinions. However, the escalating prevalence of altered and synthetic visuals poses significant challenges to media trust. These altered visuals often mislead viewers, propagate confusion, and distort public perception. Social media algorithms, optimized for engagement, can inadvertently amplify the dissemination of such content, making simple tagging insufficient to distinguish authentic from altered visuals. Contextual explanations present a promising approach by offering audiences deeper insights and encouraging more informed interpretations. In this study, we developed contextual explanations for 15 altered and synthetic images and conducted a user study to evaluate their effectiveness. Our findings show that contextual explanations consistently outperformed non-contextual ones across all evaluated metrics. We also assessed the capability of large language models (LLMs) to generate these explanations for diverse audiences. While LLM-generated explanations were generally comparable to those created by human experts, the models exhibited limitations in conveying intrinsic motivations in complex scenarios. We conclude with a discussion of the design implications and ethical considerations of this work.