An experiment showed that humans can accurately identify AI-generated human faces only 48.2% of the time. The study utilized StyleGAN2 to synthesize the faces. Interestingly, participants rated the synthetic faces as more trustworthy than real ones, potentially indicating a subconscious preference. The implications of this bias could be significant, leading to misuse and fraudulent activities. A separate study found that participants’ unconscious minds could distinguish between real and synthetic images better than conscious minds. This highlights the complexity of the brain’s interpretation of AI-generated faces. The prevalence of AI-generated deep fakes poses risks, including scams and the potential influence on voting behaviors.
Studies reveal how AI-generated faces reliably trick humans
A recent experiment found that humans can correctly identify AI-generated human faces just 48.2% of the time. The study involved 315 participants tasked with differentiating between real and AI-generated faces. The faces were synthesized using StyleGAN2, a state-of-the-art engine capable of creating diverse and realistic human likenesses.
The results were both fascinating and slightly unnerving; the participants’ ability to identify AI-generated faces hovered around 48.2% – worse than a coin flip. This suggests that to the average person, these AI deep fake faces are virtually indistinguishable from those of real human beings.
Delving deeper, the study also explored whether certain races and genders were more challenging to classify correctly. It was observed that white faces, particularly male, were the most difficult for participants to correctly identify as real or synthetic. This reason why this occurs may stem from the overrepresentation of white faces in the AI’s training dataset, leading to more realistic white synthetic faces, according to the study.
Even more intriguing was the discovery that participants rated synthetic faces as more trustworthy than real ones, albeit by a modest margin. This could hint at a subconscious preference for the average features that AI tends to generate, which previous studies have found to be perceived as inherently more trustworthy.
The implications of such a bias are profound, as they touch upon the potential for misuse in contexts like social media, where trust can influence social dynamics, political opinions, and even financial decisions. A subtle increase in the likelihood of someone interpreting an AI image as more trustworthy than a real one is very worrying indeed once scaled up to population levels. Researchers speculate that these faces could be used in fraudulent activities, disinformation campaigns, and non-consensual sexual imagery.
The brain’s interpretation of AI-generated faces is complex
A second recent study tasked participants with identifying whether a face was real or not while engaged in a task designed to distract them. They could not consciously differentiate between the two, but when their brain activity was measured using EEG, things became a little more confusing. Approximately 170 milliseconds after viewing the faces, the brain’s electrical activity diverged significantly between real and synthetic images. In other words, the unconscious mind ‘knew’ when an image could be AI-generated better than the conscious mind.
We could speculate that because participants in the first study sometimes declared AI-generated faces as more trustworthy, there’s a conscious layer of interpretation where we give AI-generated faces ‘the benefit of the doubt’ when we’re unsure. It’s almost as if initial suspicions give way to a more affirmative confirmation that the person is, in fact, real, when they’re not – a form of AI-instigated apologism.
AI-generated deep fakes are a priority risk for the technology, with a recent scandal hitting a New Jersey school. Deep fake scams are a regular occurrence, too, and there are palpable worries that fake AI-generated content could affect voting behaviors.
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