AI faces look more real than actual human faces

White faces generated by artificial intelligence (AI) now appear more real than human faces, according to new research co-authored by a UCL academic. In the study, led by the Australian National researchers and published in Psychological Science , more people thought AI-generated faces were human than the faces of real people. Co-author Dr Eva Krumhuber (UCL Psychology & Language Sciences) said: "Artificial intelligence has reached an astonishing level of realism, and here we find that sometimes it can even seem more real than reality - hyperrealism - so that we can be very easily tricked into thinking an AI-generated face is real." For the study, the researchers showed 124 participants images of different white faces and asked them to judge if the face was real or generated by the StyleGAN2 algorithm. For the AI faces, participants judged them to be real two-thirds of the time - more often than for the real faces. But this pattern was not found in other research using the same algorithm that included faces of people of varying ethnicities. The reason for the discrepancy is that AI algorithms tend to be trained disproportionately on white faces. Senior author Dr Amy Dawel (Australian National University) said: "If white AI faces are consistently perceived as more realistic, this technology could have serious implications for people of colour by ultimately reinforcing racial biases online.