Humans Find AI-Generated Faces More Trustworthy Than the Real Thing
February 28th, 2022Via: Scientific American:
One tell for a deepfake used to be the “uncanny valley” effect, an unsettling feeling triggered by the hollow look in a synthetic person’s eyes. But increasingly convincing images are pulling viewers out of the valley and into the world of deception promulgated by deepfakes.
The startling realism has implications for malevolent uses of the technology: its potential weaponization in disinformation campaigns for political or other gain, the creation of false porn for blackmail, and any number of intricate manipulations for novel forms of abuse and fraud. Developing countermeasures to identify deepfakes has turned into an “arms race” between security sleuths on one side and cybercriminals and cyberwarfare operatives on the other.
A new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA provides a measure of how far the technology has progressed. The results suggest that real humans can easily fall for machine-generated faces—and even interpret them as more trustworthy than the genuine article. “We found that not only are synthetic faces highly realistic, they are deemed more trustworthy than real faces,” says study co-author Hany Farid, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. The result raises concerns that “these faces could be highly effective when used for nefarious purposes.”
