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Generative AI has recently made significant advances in a variety of fields. It has revolutionized the process of generating and manipulating data by enabling the generation of highly realistic synthetic images, videos, and text. Generative AI demonstrates significant potential in entertainment, fashion, healthcare, and design, facilitating the production of novel and visually appealing content. However, the widespread adoption of generative AI raises ethical concerns, particularly about the creation of deceptive deep fakes and the possibility of misuse. As the field of generative AI research continues to advance, it is imperative to balance leveraging its benefits with addressing the associated ethical challenges. This will ensure responsible and ethical future deployment.
Social networking sites (SNSs) are among the most important sources of information for many people (Westerman et al., 2014). However, people do not perceive all SNSs equally; for instance, data privacy concerns have damaged Facebook's perceived trustworthiness. Chang et al. (2017) reported differences in the perception of information from Facebook and LinkedIn. Furthermore, SNSs may be the least believed sources of political information (Johnson & Kaye, 2014). A reason for the distrust of SNSs is likely the pervasiveness of fake news, which spreads through SNSs quickly and efficiently (Vosoughi et al., 2018). Therefore, comprehending the mechanisms underlying fake news is crucial, given their use in shaping public opinion (Deutsch, 2017; English, 2017; Ghanem et al., 2020; Grech & Masukume, 2017; Guess et al., 2019) and even political campaigns (Allcott & Gentzkow, 2017; Barthel et al., 2016; Shane, 2017). Various factors affect how a person will perceive a specific news article, including the people related to the person and those related to the news article.
Believability is one of the most important factors in detecting fake news. It is important to distinguish between the objective truthfulness of a news article and the subjective feeling of whether or not it is true. In this paper, we use the term veracity for the former and the term believability for the latter. Veracity refers to the objective, verifiable aspect of a story's truthfulness that is considered independent of human perceptions and judgments (French et al., 2023). People have created various fact-checking websites, like Snopes.com, to determine the veracity of a news story. These websites scrutinize statements from a news article against supporting evidence, aiming to ascertain the objective verifiability of the stated information. On the other hand, believability is heavily dependent on a person’s subjective perspective of a news article. This estimation falls under the epistemology of testimonies, as explained by Torres et al. (2018). Any shared news article can be considered a testimony of an event, and what a person who reads it does is evaluate the strength of the testimony. Their evaluation will be based on a variety of factors, including the article itself and their own personal characteristics (Torres et al., 2018). Some of the most important characteristics include authority, independent corroboration (cross-referencing information from different sources), plausibility and support, and presentation (Fallis, 2004). In this paper, we focus on the authority and presentation aspects of this epistemology.