EEG-Based Analysis of the Impact of Familiarity in the Perception of Deepfake Videos

We investigate the brain’s subliminal response to fake portrait videos using electroencephalography, with a special emphasis on the viewer’s familiarity with the depicted individuals.Deepfake videos are increasingly becoming popular but, while they are entertaining, they can also pose a threat to society. These face-swapped videos merge physiognomy and behaviour of two different individuals, both strong cues used for recognizing a person. We show that this mismatch elicits different brain responses depending on the viewer’s familiarity with the merged individuals.Using EEG, we classify perceptual differences of familiar and unfamiliar people versus their face-swapped counterparts. Our results show that it is possible to discriminate fake videos from genuine ones when at least one face-swapped actor is known to the observer. Furthermore, we indicate a correlation of classification accuracy with level of personal engagement between participant and actor, as well as with the participant’s familiarity with the used dataset.