https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/01/19/technology/artificial-intelligence-image-generators-faces-quiz.html?unlocked_article_code=1.O00.3pfz.co-d09rtPTw_&smid=url-share
People tend to overestimate their ability to spot digital fakes, researchers found.
Yeah, one of them definitely had the fake, post-processed bokeh effect added to it that a lot of phones with "portrait mode" use. Which, to be completely fair, makes that technically an AI-generated image.
I was looking for artifacts of AI generation, and I found them, but I'm still wrong. I can't win.
It makes it an AI-edited image, not AI-generated.
But yeah I agree, these sure seem like they were cherry-picked to fool you.
I gave up after the 2nd heavily edited photo. What's the point if the games rigged. Are either real faces? No.
Yeah, but I found there are telltale AI signs in the fake ones.
But you’re absolutely right. They made it harder by editing the real faces to make them look fake anyway.
the real photos just looked like professional photography, that's how your photos will look like when you hire a photographer
This is the sort of thing that I like to send to people who assure me that "all AI generated art looks wrong" or whatever.
No, the AI generated art that looks wrong is the only AI generated art that you notice. The rest slips by.
9/10.
AI sucks at reflections, so pay attention to the pupils to see if both eyes reflect similar shapes.
Also a few had odd lines where their neck was like surgically reattached to another body.
Also, pupils are often not regular circles in AI images. The only one I got wrong was the real picture of the guy wearing dirty glasses.
I think the point still holds. AI generation has gotten very very good which requires you to look for minute details most people won't know to look for. The small issues you point out are probably easily solved if you really wanted to make them even harder to detect with a post processing model or just eventually improvements. This is just some random blog post too, so it's unlikely they even put that much work into it. I'm sure experts will emerge that will have all those details in mind to make them even harder to detect.
As always, it’s hard to determine what is AI and what is a filter. The guy whose entire face was edited to be flat and tilted 10 degrees toward the camera got me. That said, 8/10. The first two clued me into what the author was going for and I got the rest right.
Modern phone cameras are passing pretty much all photos through AI filters now to add detail or upscale, so filtered photos are more the norm than exception now, so that doesn't really help people to filter out AI images. Point still stands that it's already gotten extremely good and now requires recognizing tiny details. It doesn't have to go far to get to the point where it'll be next to impossible to tell.
Faces are very well done these days, you can go to https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/ and keep refreshing images. Eventuall you'll notice little things, like earrings not matching or sunglasses being 2 different halves melded together, hats and hair can look weird, etc
But most of them appear very human
That’s wild. Some of them are really good, but I see what you mean once you keep refreshing the page. Glasses are a good tell once you look closely. Earlobes also appear to be difficult to perfect as well.
I went back to the NYT article and tried again with my goldfish memory using that deduction and got 6/10.
Also, these are all emulating professional camera conditions. In a more standard phone photo scenario, the lower quality can lead to all sorts of weird looking illusions in real photos that can make them look ai generated. I was playing with some AI photo editing and saw some things that looked off which I thought was the generation messing up, but after checking the original photo again I saw that the weird stuff was actually in the original photo due to weird shadows or motion blur.
For me it was the eyes. Pretty much all of the real faces had realistic reflections in the eyes. The AI ones didn’t.
I got 8/10. The blond AI and the dude with glasses were the two I missed.
I know you're joking, but the opposite is likely the future of game graphics: First a conventional render, perhaps even with path-tracing (although that might not be necessary), then AI on top:
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I've done a lot of stuff with generative models called GANs, like StyleGAN (2?) which I believe these pictures to be from. My main focus is the "hair bubble effect". This works best for people with longer hair, which is why I had 30% wrong in this test. Basically, by starting at images generated by these models for a long time, I started noticing that it is bad at creating the few loose hairs that stand out from the main pack. These plucks of hair often seem to go around some invisible "bubble" or weirdly flow together with the background. So my main point of focus is often the transition between hair and background, or just the hair in general, since that's where it's most likely to mess up. But the images picked here were also intentionally picked to be the most confusing according to the rest of the article, so it's not that weird that these are hard to classify. Some of the real ones looked extremely AI to me, and it was only after the first false positive that I got a lot more careful with labeling some as "AI" than I normally would.
Example, the strands of hair here (though admittedly the effect is not very convincing here):
I got 6/10. For me the thing I was looking for most was images that seemed to have wrinkles and things that seemed slightly blurred out. I don't know if this is because it's trained on a dataset where real people frequently do this (which is why it's only a 6/10, because many pictures of real people have this feature as well), or if it's because it's generating detail and that's just how it looks in current versions.
I was mostly looking for details to indicate the person was real. Got 8/10. Someone had an odd tooth, someone else's eyebrow hair looked like they had just woken up. There was one picture I immediately knew was AI, because it just seemed off. Another had some strange wrinkle texture on the neck that just seemed unnatural. One of the 2 I got wrong because I thought the eye wrinkles were too much for the rest of the face. Turned out to be a real person.
You beat random chance! I mean in the opposite direction.... So I'm not really sure what that says...
I failed the first 6 guesses and quit. Years before this recent AI boom, there was thispersondoesnotexist and even back then, AI was generating extremely convincing faces.
Not with current methods.
I think this would require something closer to an actual AI an not the pattern recognition machines we use at the moment.
So I figured out the difference here, and it’s gamed to make you think they’re backward.
The real photos appear to be professionally edited with the light, filters, and bokeh being perfect while the AI generated are more like candids you’d take with your phone. This is an intentional move by the author to make this scarier than it actually is, imo. Next to each other we expect the AI to be more ‘perfect’ than the real photos. Once I figured that out I got them all right.
If they’d put candids next to these AI generated images I’m willing to bet you’d have done better.
7/10. Real people are much uglier than what AI generates, e.g. more skin texture, asymmetrical features, odd face proportions etc. Unfortunately makes telling apart edited/filtered images of real people very difficult from AI generated ones.
IIRC people find "average" looking faces much more attractive, and if AI is essentially mushing many different faces together this would make sense.
I think they purposefully picked real people with slightly odd proportions to try and throw you off, but did it a little too consistently making it easier to guess. I think with more work put into it it would be very hard to tell. It's hard to tell and this is just a quickly thrown together blog quiz.
I got the same score, though I got the dark haired woman. I don't remember the one I missed instead.
I feel like trying to identify unedited images and AI isn't as hard, but when they're edited it gives many of the same details that AI generated ones have. Mostly it's the smoothing out of details. This could be just that the AI was trained on a dataset pulled from images available online (which are almost all edited to some extent) or just because the way it generates it makes details not quite clear. Probably a little of both.
I surprisingly got 6/10. The AI ones that I guessed had some faint lines on the skin near the chin that seemed kinda blurry.
Got 6/10, for at least 2 pictures I looked at the outside corners of the eyes, if they match it's likely AI, most real humans likely do not have symmetry there.
Well since it's a bunch of real faces combined it's not that difficult to make a realistic face.
That's not how modern AI image generation works. AI no longer just mix-and-matches various assets from a library. It's creating its own unique images based on what it knows about the shapes and colors of things its been trained on.
