{"id":61,"date":"2026-07-14T16:33:51","date_gmt":"2026-07-14T16:33:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/essienarthur.net\/daviedan\/?p=61"},"modified":"2026-07-14T16:34:51","modified_gmt":"2026-07-14T16:34:51","slug":"one-of-these-faces-is-ai-can-you-identify-which","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/essienarthur.net\/daviedan\/2026\/07\/14\/one-of-these-faces-is-ai-can-you-identify-which\/","title":{"rendered":"One of these faces is AI. Can you identify which?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Psychologist Dr Clare Sutherland is holding up two large photos. One shows the face of an Australian academic leading an international research study; the other is an AI-generated deepfake.<\/p>\n

Artificial intelligence has become so adept at creating realistic images, it is increasingly hard to figure out what is real or not.<\/p>\n

But can people be trained to spot an image of a human that has actually been created by a machine?<\/p>\n

That’s a question Sutherland, from the University of Aberdeen, and her Australian colleague have been examining.<\/p>\n

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It used to be far easier to spot computer-generated visual creations – often used by fraudsters – because AI would make blunders, like adding an extra finger or something else that was obviously weird.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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But AI learns from its mistakes.<\/p>\n

“Training on visual artifacts, like looking for a sixth finger or odd earrings, has had limited success, partly because the AI is getting too good, and fraudsters may avoid using pictures with obvious flaws anyway,” explained Prof Amy Dawel.<\/p>\n

She is the woman with shoulder-length hair in the picture being held by Sutherland. The man’s image is the fake.<\/p>\n

Dawel is the director of the Australian National University Emotions and Faces Lab.<\/p>\n

She has been leading a team of researchers in Australia, Canada and the UK to find out if people can be trained to rumble the AI imposters.<\/p>\n

The answer, for now at least, is yes – but learning to spot an AI fake requires a more subtle approach.<\/p>\n

Getting a feel for fakes<\/h2>\n

Sutherland is leading the UK-based\u00a0research at the University of Aberdeen.<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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She said they had noticed they were getting a feel for which faces were real or AI just by looking at them.<\/p>\n

“So we thought, OK, it would be really interesting to see if we could teach other people this too,” she said.<\/p>\n

For the experiments a pool of thousands of AI-generated faces was created using an AI image tool called StyleGAN3, one of the most realistic face generators available.<\/p>\n

Participants were tested before and after being given training<\/p>\n

What were they trained to look out for?<\/h2>\n

The researchers trained participants in the studies by drawing their attention to six perceptual qualities:<\/p>\n