Flip a coin. Heads: The photo you’re looking at is real. Tails: It’s been generated by artificial intelligence, or AI. Either way, you would probably be guessing, and that’s the problem.
Last year, a research study published in Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery, a magazine by one of the largest and most influential professional organizations for computer scientists, found that people could distinguish AI-generated media from authentic content only about 51% of the time, roughly the same accuracy as random chance. As generative tools improve, the human eye is quickly losing the ability to tell what’s real online and what’s fabricated.
The consequences are already visible. Online retailers are experiencing a surge of fraudulent returns using AI-generated images. Deepfake-related financial losses exceeded $200 million in just three months of 2025.
While the tools that create synthetic media are advancing quickly, the systems to verify them are still fragmented or missing entirely.
At Arizona State University, Yezhou “YZ” Yang is working to change that.