Unmasking the Illusion: AI-Generated Faces Challenge Perceptions

Research shows survey participants duped by AI-generated images nearly 40 percent 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 other 10 generated by Stable Diffusion or DALL-E, two commonly used AI programs that generate images.