Test Yourself: Which Faces Were Made by A.I.?

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.

Yeah what the fuck was that about? Clearly rigged for sensationalism.

the real photos just looked like professional photography, that's how your photos will look like when you hire a photographer

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.

Yep, same with 8/10. Real faces are less symmetrical than AI

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

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'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):

2/10 here as well. I went fast to test myself.

The eyes. Look for non-circular pupils or noticeably different-sized pupils.

You beat random chance! I mean in the opposite direction.... So I'm not really sure what that says...

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.

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.

Imagine the data they will collect from the dozens of lemmy users.

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.

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.

Same, so no better than random chance

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.

It’s perfectly ok to admit you got 0/10. No judgement here!

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.