Dataset Biases and Shortcut Learning in Motion-Based AI-Generated Video Detection

Abstract

The visual quality of AI-generated videos has improved drastically in recent years, making it increasingly difficult for humans to distinguish between real and synthetic media. In this work, we evaluate the robustness and applicability of four state-of-the-art motion-based AI-generated video detectors. We identify significant preprocessing and sampling biases in these methods and demonstrate that they account for a substantial portion of their reported performance. Furthermore, we find that these detectors are highly sensitive to motion patterns specific to their evaluation datasets, where AI-generated videos generally exhibit less inter-frame movement than real videos. We show that for all detectors, performance collapses to near-random levels when evaluated on a dataset that does not contain this motion bias. Additionally, through dataset rebalancing and the application of simple spatial augmentations, we observe severe performance degradation across all evaluated models. In contrast, we find that an existing frequency-based detector maintains strong performance across all evaluated datasets, suggesting that frequency-based approaches may offer a more generalizable path forward for AI-generated video detection. We hope that our work raises awareness towards these vulnerabilities and encourages the development of more representative, unbiased datasets and more robust evaluation protocols.