Social media posts influence investor decisions and the value of companies. YouTubers have no problem duplicating the content of their colleagues from abroad. It is impossible to distinguish whether a post was written by a human or a bot. These are some of the conclusions from the research performed by students of the Artificial Intelligence field of study.

Students of Artificial Intelligence for the eightth time presented posters with the results of research they had performed as part of the “Digital Media Analysis” course taught by Prof. Tomasz Kajdanowicz and Prof. Stanisław Woźniak. During their one-minute speeches, students presented 14 projects. They talked about the methods and effects of their work, which they presented on posters. What are their conclusions?

Apparently, it is easy to detect whether we live in information bubbles and what type of bubbles they are. Several projects concerned the fact that it is impossible to distinguish content generated in social media from real content. It is very difficult to detect whether there is a human on the other side of the screen. It is impossible to distinguish who actually wrote the post. In some projects students created a tool for detecting content generated by AI and analysed software for detecting generative images.

One of the groups studied the impact of posts in social media on investors' decisions. There was also a project on current tattoo trends. It turns out that the currently most popular tattoos are with... cats.

Students supervised by Prof. Tomasz Kajdanowicz also proved that YouTubers, not only Polish ones, love to copy the content of leading influencers, especially from the USA. LinkedIn or pasteIn – apparently it pays to copy. And speaking of earning money on the Internet, the students also found that less formal photos are liked more frequently, and thus bring more income to influencers.   

A few posters presented projects on emotions. Their authors analysed user reactions in social media. The results indicate that by carefully reading comments online, you can predict the results of Eurovision or the presidential election in the USA. However, a lot of media hype does not always translate into success. This is the case in the film world, where media hype improves the box office results only for films of only certain genres or studios. Good examples are horror movies and Marvel productions.

Photos from the event can be found here.