Honors Theses

Document Type

Thesis

Date of Completion

Spring 4-30-2026

Academic Year

2025-2026

Department

Interdisciplinary

Academic Major

Interdisciplinary Studies

Second Academic Major

Theological Studies

Faculty Advisor

Laurie Diles, Ph.D.

Abstract

This study aims to answer the question of whether the speaker’s gender, the participant’s gender, or the interaction between the two has an effect on the audience’s opinions of the message and the credibility of the speaker. Public speaking has been and continues to be a tool used by politicians, both on the campaign trail and as they seek to advance their agendas in the public sphere. Politicians use humor to relate to their audience and enhance their likeability and credibility. Google VEO 3’s generative text-to-video AI capabilities were used to create two videos of political speakers, one male and one female. To craft the dialogue of the speech, ChatGPT was utilized to generate a generic political speech. The videos were shown at two separate showings where viewers answered McCroskey’s (1999) questions of credibility following viewing of the speech. A Two-Way ANOVA analysis of the survey resulted in a finding of no significant effect of speaker gender or participant gender on perceived credibility. An unexpected finding, however, was the way Google Veo 3 interacted with a text prompt when generating the male video versus the female video. Some characteristics of these videos could be perceived as favoring the male speaker over the female speaker.

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