With artificial intelligence, it's not easy to distinguish the real from the fake. Especially when this technology is used to generate ultra-realistic faces. Researchers from the University of Lancaster have found that it is extremely difficult for us to differentiate a real face from another created from scratch by algorithms.
They conducted several experiments to determine how realistic these synthetic faces are. The researchers first asked 315 participants to identify, among 800 portraits, the faces of real people and those generated by artificial intelligence.
They obtained an accuracy rate of 48.2%, slightly lower than if picking by chance. A second group of participants were trained to recognise artificial faces before taking the same test. Their result? 59% accuracy.