TYCOV: A Year-Long Open Behavioral Study on Human Ability to Detect AI-Generated Images

Generative image models have rapidly improved, producing visuals that arefrequently indistinguishable from real photographs. We present TYCOV (TestYour Cognitive Vision), an open-source web application and reproducible ex-perimental pipeline to measure human ability to detect AI-generated images. Ina 55-week public deployment, 60,123 trial-level responses were collected from1,217 unique participants who completed forced-choice classifications on abalanced stimulus set (223 real; 223 AI). Aggregate accuracy was 60.3%; class-conditional accuracies were 67.8% for real images and 52.8% for AI images.We emphasize that trial-level analyses are clustered within participants; accord-ingly, cluster-aware inferential analyses were conducted. Analysis outputs andreproduction instructions are included in the repository’s README.md andPaper.md.