It sounds like a scenario straight out of a Ridley Scott film: technology that not only sounds more “real” than actual humans, but looks more convincing, too. Yet it seems that moment has already arrived.
A new study has found people are more likely to think pictures of white faces generated by AI are human than photographs of real individuals.
“Remarkably, white AI faces can convincingly pass as more real than human faces — and people do not realize they are being fooled,” the researchers report.
Photo: Reuters
The team, which includes researchers from Australia, the UK and the Netherlands, said their findings had important implications in the real world, including in identity theft, with the possibility that people could end up being duped by digital impostors.
However, the team said the results did not hold for images of people of color, possibly because the algorithm used to generate AI faces was largely trained on images of white people.
Zak Witkower, a co-author of the research from the University of Amsterdam, said that could have ramifications for areas ranging from online therapy to robots.
“It’s going to produce more realistic situations for white faces than other race faces,” he said.
The team caution such a situation could also mean perceptions of race end up being confounded with perceptions of being “human,” adding it could also perpetuate social biases, including in finding missing children, given this can depend on AI-generated faces.
Writing in the journal Psychological Science, the team describe how they carried out two experiments. In one, white adults were each shown half of a selection of 100 AI white faces and 100 human white faces. The team chose this approach to avoid potential biases in how own-race faces are recognized compared with other-race faces.
The participants were asked to select whether each face was AI-generated or real, and how confident they were on a 100-point scale.
The results from 124 participants reveal that 66 percent of AI images were rated as human compared with 51 percent of real images.
The team said re-analysis of data from a previous study had found people were more likely to rate white AI faces as human than real white faces. However, this was not the case for people of color, where about 51 people of both AI and real faces were judged as human. The team added that they did not find the results were affected by the participants’ race.
In a second experiment, participants were asked to rate AI and human faces on 14 attributes, such as age and symmetry, without being told some images were AI-generated.
The team’s analysis of results from 610 participants suggested the main factors that led people to erroneously believe AI faces were human included greater proportionality in the face, greater familiarity and less memorability.
Somewhat ironically, while humans seem unable to tell apart real faces from those generated by AI, the team developed a machine learning system that can do so with 94 percent accuracy.
Clare Sutherland, co-author of the study from the University of Aberdeen, said the study highlighted the importance of tackling biases in AI.
“As the world changes extremely rapidly with the introduction of AI, it’s critical that we make sure that no one is left behind or disadvantaged in any situation — whether due to ethnicity, gender, age, or any other protected characteristic,” she said.
China has begun recruiting for a planetary defense force after risk assessments determined that an asteroid could conceivably hit Earth in 2032. Job ads posted online by China’s State Administration of Science, Technology and Industry for National Defence (SASTIND) this week, sought young loyal graduates focused on aerospace engineering, international cooperation and asteroid detection. The recruitment drive comes amid increasing focus on an asteroid with a low — but growing — likelihood of hitting earth in seven years. The 2024 YR4 asteroid is at the top of the European and US space agencies’ risk lists, and last week analysts increased their probability
Feb. 17 to Feb. 23 “Japanese city is bombed,” screamed the banner in bold capital letters spanning the front page of the US daily New Castle News on Feb. 24, 1938. This was big news across the globe, as Japan had not been bombarded since Western forces attacked Shimonoseki in 1864. “Numerous Japanese citizens were killed and injured today when eight Chinese planes bombed Taihoku, capital of Formosa, and other nearby cities in the first Chinese air raid anywhere in the Japanese empire,” the subhead clarified. The target was the Matsuyama Airfield (today’s Songshan Airport in Taipei), which
On a misty evening in August 1990, two men hiking on the moors surrounding Calvine, a pretty hamlet in Perth and Kinross, claimed to have seen a giant diamond-shaped aircraft flying above them. It apparently had no clear means of propulsion and left no smoke plume; it was silent and static, as if frozen in time. Terrified, they hit the ground and scrambled for cover behind a tree. Then a Harrier fighter jet roared into view, circling the diamond as if sizing it up for a scuffle. One of the men snapped a series of photographs just before the bizarre
For decades, Taiwan Railway trains were built and serviced at the Taipei Railway Workshop, originally built on a flat piece of land far from the city center. As the city grew up around it, however, space became limited, flooding became more commonplace and the noise and air pollution from the workshop started to affect more and more people. Between 2011 and 2013, the workshop was moved to Taoyuan and the Taipei location was retired. Work on preserving this cultural asset began immediately and we now have a unique opportunity to see the birth of a museum. The Preparatory Office of National