Registered Report: Does Repetition Increase the Credibility of AI-Generated Images?

Abstract

In an era where digital imagery has become ubiquitous, the ease of creating fake or AI-generated images poses a critical challenge to credibility assessment. Repetition increases the credibility of written and verbal information. Does this credibility gain also apply to pictures? Participants were exposed to both genuine and AI-generated images, followed by a credibility assessment phase including repeated and new images. We found that participants judged repeated images as more credible than new images, regardless of whether those images were genuine or AI-generated. This repetition effect remained consistent across diverse image categories with low between-image variability. These findings highlight a potent mechanism for the spread of visual misinformation: Images repeatedly shared across social media platforms may gain unwarranted credibility through mere exposure, regardless of their authenticity. However, the precise cognitive mechanisms underlying the repetition effect for pictures—and whether they differ from those established for verbal information—remain important questions for future research.