MIT Technology Review’s Can you spot a liar? It’s a question I imagine has been on a lot of minds lately, in the wake of various televised political debates. Research that we’re generally pretty bad at telling a truth from a lie. AI-based lie detection systems could one day be used to help us sift fact from fake news, evaluate claims, and potentially even spot fibs and exaggerations in job applications.
The question is whether we will trust them. And if we should. Related Story AI, emotion recognition, and Darwin In a recent study, Alicia von Schenk and her colleagues developed a tool that was significantly better than people at spotting lies.
Von Schenk, an economist at the University of Würzburg in Germany, and her team then ran some experiments to find out how people used it. In some ways, the tool was helpful—the people who made use of it were better at spotting lies. But they also led people to make a lot more accusations.
In published in the journal iScience, von Schenk and her colleagues asked volunteers to write statements about their weekend plans. Half the time, people were incentivized to lie; a believable yet untrue statement was rewarded with a small financial payout. In total, the team collected 1,536 statements from 768 people.
When they tested the resulting tool on the final 20% of statements, they found it could successfully tell whether a statement was true or false 67% of the time. That’s significantly better than a typical human; we usually onl.
