🧵 3 papers by me & my team Ullrich Ecker Fabio Carrella Emily Spearing Almog Simchon ask an urgent question: if you tell people they're being manipulated by AI — deepfakes, AI-written articles, microtargeted ads — is the manipulation defanged? Thread 👇 1/10 AI-driven manipulation comes in three forms, each tested in our research: • Deepfake videos • AI-generated misinformation articles • Personality-targeted political ads We ran multiple preregistered experiments to see if warnings protect people. Spoiler: They largely don't. 2/10 Paper 1 (Clark & Lewandowsky, Communications Psychology, 2026): participants watched a deepfake video of a person appearing to confess a crime or moral transgression. Some participants were warned beforehand that it was fake. nature.com 3/10
www.nature.com
Even with a specific warning — "this video has been flagged as a deepfake" — participants still judged the person significantly more guilty than controls. Critically: even people who said they believed the warning were still influenced by the content. 4/10
A generic warning ("deepfakes exist") had no effect on whether people thought the video was fake — but still shifted guilt judgments compared to a content-free control. "Seeing is believing" persists even when you know what you're seeing is fabricated. 5/10 Paper 2 (Spearing, Gile, Fogwill, Prike, Swire-Thompson, Lewandowsky & Ecker, Royal Society Open Science, 2025): can warnings reduce reliance on an AI-written misinformation article? royalsocietypublishing.org 6/10 First surprise: labelling an article as written by ChatGPT vs. a human made no difference. People were equally misled. The standard ChatGPT disclaimer ("I can make mistakes") also had zero effect on how much people relied on the misinformation. Zero. 7/10
A source inoculation ("AI can fabricate info") did reduce general trust in AI — but still didn't stop people relying on the specific misleading article. Only inoculation + debunking combined eliminated the misinformation effect entirely. One tool is not enough. 8/10
Paper 3 (Carrella, Simchon, Edwards & Lewandowsky, Communications Psychology, 2025): can popup warnings — "this ad is tailored to your personality" — neutralise microtargeted political ads? Three studies, N > 1,700. nature.com 9/10
www.nature.com
Personality-targeted ads were significantly more persuasive than non-targeted ads in all three studies. The popup warning had no practically meaningful effect. Equivalence tests confirmed the popup's impact was statistically indistinguishable from zero. 10/10
11/12 Across all three papers, the same pattern: transparency — simply telling people they're being manipulated — reduces AI-driven influence at best partially, and often not at all. This is a critical problem, because the EU AI Act relies heavily on transparency as its main tool. What might actually work? Probably combinations: inoculation + debunking together, proactive platform design changes, and possibly stronger regulation that goes well beyond labelling. Warnings alone are unlikely to be sufficient. Regulators need to catch up with the science. 🔬