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Sean Kapić Gomes

When Seeing Is Not Believing: AI Video and Trust on Social Media

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I’m Sean Kapić Gomes, a fourth year Professional Communication student at TMU pursuing a minor in Public Relations. Throughout my degree, I’ve worked on a range of projects that focus on communication, media, and content creation, which has helped me better understand how audiences engage with different types of media. For a while, I wasn’t entirely sure what career path I wanted to follow, but more recently I’ve developed an interest in marketing, especially in areas like social media, content strategy, and audience engagement. I’m particularly interested in how content is created, presented, and interpreted online, and how that shapes the way people understand what they’re seeing.

This project explores how authenticity is presented in social media videos that include AI generated or heavily edited content. As AI tools become more common in content creation, it is becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish what is real from what is constructed online. To examine this, I analyzed a sample of posts from TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook, looking at how AI content appears and how it is framed across different platforms. The findings show that while AI is present across all three platforms, it is used in different ways. TikTok and Instagram tend to use AI for entertainment and creative purposes, while Facebook showed a much higher presence of content that appears to present itself as real. Overall, the project highlights how authenticity on social media is becoming more complex and why it is important to approach online content with greater awareness.

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