Using AI Literacy and Visual Literacy to Identify Synthetic Media

With the rise of synthetic media online, it is becoming increasingly more important to understand how educators should teach AI identification. This study aims to identify how AI and visual literacy can influence AI identification and see if these literacies should be included as frameworks for teaching AI identification. Through interviewing six university students with either AI literacy or AI literacy and visual literacy, we assessed how accurate they were, what strategies they used, and how confident they were in decision-making when judging real and AI-generated images of human faces. I found that these students had a high average accuracy compared to other studies and utilized strategies that relied on their previous experience to aid their decision-making process. As for confidence, students with only AI literacy were much less confident than those with both literacies, but this could be attributed to a lesser experience with visual media.