Can you tell AI-generated people from real ones?

AI-generated images of an Indian man, an Asian woman and a Black man. Research shows survey participants duped by AI-generated images nearly 40 per cent of the time If you recently had trouble figuring out if an image of a person is real or generated through artificial intelligence (AI), you're not alone. A new study from University of Waterloo researchers found that people had more difficulty than was expected distinguishing who is a real person and who is artificially generated. The Waterloo study saw 260 participants provided with 20 unlabeled pictures: 10 of which were of real people obtained from Google searches, and the oth er 10 generated by Stable Diffusion or DALL-E, two commonly used AI programs that generate images. Participants were asked to label each image as real or AI-generated and explain why they made their decision. Only 61 per cent of participants could tell the difference between AI-generated people and real ones, far below the 85 per cent threshold that researchers expected. "People are not as adept at making the distinction as they think they are," said Andreea Pocol, a PhD candidate in Computer Science at the University of Waterloo and the study's lead author.