7 ms·

Which face is real?

235 points by GamerUncle 4y ago

ki_ 4y ago
Faces are great, but the backgrounds are wrong, also clothing, ears sometimes and there are strange circles here and there. i get ~19/20 correct.
- Medox 4y ago
  shadows also help in identifying the real person.
can16358p 4y ago
It's usually the glitchy artifacts which give the clues. Not the face itself, bur what's around it/background/other objects etc. Check for weird-looking "something's not right" objects/backgrounds and you'll get most of it fine.
- strken 4y ago
  I got five in a row without looking for glitches or background objects, then stopped. Look really carefully at a small area of skin. See if wrinkles, pores, hairs, and minor skin imperfections are present. See if they make sense in the context of the rest of the face.
xeyownt 4y ago
I find the result impressive. I'm sure this fools a majority of people, contrary to the comments here. Obviously, with detailed analysis, you can probably spot the difference, but in day-to-day activity, and without knowing that one picture is fake, you will fool even more.
- number6 4y ago
  In this context you are looking for fakes, but on a website with Sales Person Avatars e.g. in a Chat I wouldn't search for fakes. I wouldn't assume the Avatars are the real persons either but yeah persons...
jayceedenton 4y ago
I'd love to see what images from the training set look most similar to a given generated face. It's hard to decide whether these are impressive without knowing whether each face is just a real face with some minor adjustments.
- andybak 4y ago
  You can take a photo not in the training set and usually find a close match. So in a sense almost any photo matches an AI generated one with "minor adjustments".
skc 4y ago
Dead simple if you just focus on the ears. Every single fake image has poorly rendered ears, which makes perfect sense as the contouring would be hard to get right for an AI
- mdjt 4y ago
  And the teeth
anotheraccount9 4y ago
After 5 minutes, I got tired and started seeing some of the same pictures again. 100% right all the time. For me, the trick is to assess the background, ear shape, synthetic textile (if any), and skin conditions.
- Keyframe 4y ago
  Outside of any obvious anomalies, telling sign seems to be AI generates eyes symmetrical on the center of the screen.
  - RiverBucketShoe 4y ago
    yeah. but if this were randomized or corrected, it would be A LOT harder for me personally.
- Pompidou 4y ago
  Skin is more glossy in theses IA photos than it should be.
- shipman05 4y ago
  +1 to the background trick. Faces were pretty convincing, but the generated backgrounds all seemed to have a generic filler appearance.
  - stiiv 4y ago
    For me, the backgrounds were interesting for their _more salient_ features rather than their ambience, e.g. unexpected smears of color, textures that vaguely looked like real things at a glance (like fabric or nature) but wouldn't stand up to scrutiny. They reminded me of the typical "mistakes" that you see when playing around with image generators.
    - dwringer 4y ago
      My heuristic in picking the fake one was to examine the fabric - the fake ones are all wearing what seems to be Dan Flashes.
drippingfist69 4y ago
Has we we trained AI to tell the difference?
notum 4y ago
Eyes and backgrounds. Easy peasy, 10/10. Backgrounds should be generated by a different model and face should be pasted in, now that would be a real challenge! Models that fix eyes already exist.
- itslennysfault 4y ago
  Or just use real background images and composite an AI face on top. The question which face is real so using the background is kinda "cheating" imo. So using a real photo for the background eliminates that technique to cheat.
- Strom 4y ago
  I also got 10/10, but by looking at ears and facial hair. There's a long way to go for a test like this. That said, if I didn't know I was looking for artifacts, all of those pictures would be passable at a glance.
- lqet 4y ago
  There are almost always these strangely colored, flare-like artifacts in the background or on the skin. Looking for those, I also easily scored 10/10.
- fh973 4y ago
  Ears and teeth artifacts, if present. If the head is rotated slightly, the faces, especially the cheeks are getting slightly distorted in the artificial images.
mkl95 4y ago
So far it struggles with ears, neck, and hair
LocalH 4y ago
It's the background. The faces look half decent but all the AI backgrounds are fucked in some way. After a few misses getting my bearings I started getting nearly 100% success rate, and within a second and a half in most cases.
JetAlone 4y ago
At first I was tricked a handful of times, but I trained myself in what to look for. At first uneven blemishes proved a useful heuristic, but then when I looked deeper I found the edges and backgrounds were even more effective. The fakes somehow feel like they are in this... Oily world of illusions.
philliphaydon 4y ago
I got the first 5 wrong because I thought I was meant to pick the computer, not the real person. After that I did ~20, got them all correct. There's alot of tells. Glasses make the edge of the eyes look strange. Around the ears, hats, sometimes the backgrounds etc, the blurs are wrong or corrupt. However, if I didnt know 1 of the 2 were generated, I wouldn't look for anything and would probably just assume it's real, unless there was real obvious corruption on the face.
signaru 4y ago
On a streak so far. I'm playing "can you tell which picture has a non blurry background and has no artifacts?" edit: My first mistake is when I thought a piece of fabric on a human was unusually warped.
- latency-guy2 4y ago
  My game is looking at the eyes, seems like the model has a tendency to make faces that have pretty much mirrored eye shapes and sockets, pupils being clear of imperfections or just plain circles or even both pupils being identical to each other, tilt is also a huge issue, most of the AI images have their output "looking directly into the lens" and nearly perpendicular to the aperture, real humans are off center in more ways than one in all of these aspects and more, as well as having numerous orientations To me, looking at the background is kind of cheating to sus out facial features, after all we are trying to figure out if the face is real not the background
  - dreamer7 4y ago
    True, in most cases, backgrounds with a lot of elements (ex: a house in the background) were part of real pictures
    - hnbad 4y ago
      Typically in AI generated images another giveaway is that when the head covers the entire height of the picture, the background may randomly change between the left and right side in implausible ways.
  - jffhn 4y ago
    >My game is looking at the eyes I look at the hairs. In real images you can see their fine threaded structure, in fake ones it's rather blurry and inconsistent.
  - rpastuszak 4y ago
    Looking at the ears has worked for me 100% of time.
shorthistory 4y ago
human trains GAN model --> GAN model trains human
stevewatson301 4y ago
I'll simply observe that it is easy to tell a fake face when presented an either/or choice and when specifically asked to. Most of the time we aren't looking as closely, so while I see some commenters being very happy about their accomplishments, I don't personally see a reason to rejoice. Regardless, the AP news article[1] linked under the "methods" page provides some useful reading on how to detect these faces, for anyone interested. [1] https://apnews.com/article/ap-top-news-artificial-intelligence-social-platforms-think-tanks-politics-bc2f19097a4c4fffaa00de6770b8a60d https://apnews.com/article/ap-top-news-artificial-intelligen...
- adql 4y ago
  You can also look for artifacts but yeah, it could have both faces generated by AI and in many cases you wouldn't be able to tell. If you know how to look for imperfections and quirks it's easier but ain't nobody doing it for just a image without "this might be AI" context
- bippingchip 4y ago
  This is a very important distinction. With deliberate attention, you can indeed catch many fakes in this kind of scenario (to me it seems the background is often a giveaway, but you do need to focus on it) But in passing, accompanying a news article, a tweet or an instagram post, are you paying as much attention? Those are the scenarios where the potential for harm is much bigger.
- dmichulke 4y ago
  Here's the important paragraph (I made it bullet points): ... reeled off a list of digital tells that he believes show the Jones photo was created by a computer program, including - inconsistencies around Jones’ eyes, - the ethereal glow around her hair and - smudge marks on her left cheek
  - Puts 4y ago
    For me I didn't even look at the face. To me the obvious giveaway that made me spot all of them was, first of all the unnatural bokeh that you see in all AI images that don't look like anything a camera would produce. And the second thing is looking at clothing that folds in strange ways.
hacsky 4y ago
Look not at the face but around the ears and the backgrounds.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
Brajeshwar 4y ago
Seems like I have been looking and playing around with too many of these AI-Generated imagery! I got the first 15-odd all correct.
siraben 4y ago
Since this uses StyleGAN, it's relatively easy to tell when an image is fake or real, since the networks seems to have trouble with backgrounds and faces that are directly adjacent to the main face. However, since diffusion models are all the rage now, I think we would perform significantly worse with landscapes or images of fruits and animals, especially if the task is "distinguish between the real and fake art".
jrootabega 4y ago
Muriel Bowser is in there.
nitwit005 4y ago
It asks to click on the person who is "real", which gets a bit strange when "real" seems to be someone in green contacts and a wig for cosplay: https://www.whichfaceisreal.com/realimages/12481.jpeg https://www.whichfaceisreal.com/realimages/12481.jpeg Biggest issue seems to be a number of images of people consuming their deformed selves: https://www.whichfaceisreal.com/fakeimages/image-2019-02-18_165449.jpeg https://www.whichfaceisreal.com/fakeimages/image-2019-02-18_... https://www.whichfaceisreal.com/fakeimages/image-2019-02-17_222220.jpeg https://www.whichfaceisreal.com/fakeimages/image-2019-02-17_...
- brettermeier 4y ago
  Well, even Cos-players are real persons...
  - nitwit005 4y ago
    They're a real person doing their best to look like a fake person.
everyone 4y ago
This game seems quite easy. When I know one of them is computer generated and one not, it's easy to pick the real one. Like a multiple choice question is much easier than otherwise. I didnt get a single one wrong, and am now playing with the rule that I have to decide within a few seconds, still all right. Still, they're pretty good, If one of the CG images came up by itself in the course of other business I wouldn't bat an eyelid.
kagaw 4y ago
I suggest to develop an AI that can tell which one is a robot or a human
- philshem 4y ago
  Isn't that what we are training when we complete tasks on these sites?!
spaintech 4y ago
Eyes, teeth, and Ears, that’s my endgame… plenty of anomalies there, took me about one per second to get 20 right in a rows then I stopped playing. I figured I was trining the the system… your welcome!
dalmo3 4y ago
My hypothesis was "children are always real". Got about 15 right before a fake child appeared.
thatjoeoverthr 4y ago
Perfect score, but it’s such an impressive technology. Traditional graphics with triangles and ray tracing are fake at a glance, but here you need attention to detail and a bit of wit.
shimonabi 4y ago
I got 9/10 correct.
trentearl 4y ago
After doing 30 I was able to differentiate very quickly, it's surprising how easy it is to detect these. You can tell by abnormalities in ears and AI probably wont show you hands because it struggles a lot. The backgrounds often look correct but dont make architectural sense. I also noticed if I dont look at the person in the eyes it sometimes is a tell, I'm not sure why though.
darepublic 4y ago
After a while I could determine the fakes by carefully scrutinizing the ears. On first impression I can't tell them apart though
shever73 4y ago
Same as the other commenters, I got the first couple wrong, but then quickly realised what I was looking for. You can see artefacts in the skin of many of the faces, and often the ears were the giveaway.
lvncelot 4y ago
I found that in direct comparison, the background often was enough to tell the difference - but that was mostly because one of the images had a detailed background with text or architecture, which I know the AI would struggle with. I think a similar test that is not asking for a direct comparison but just "is this image real?" would be much harder, since there is no better "safe" choice to fall back on.
bagels 4y ago
20/20 chosen correctly. Yes I think I can. The AI images are very impressive, but there are always artifacts that give it away.
IndySun 4y ago
Is this a serious topic worthy of serious responses from high ranking HN readers? Depressing. They're both photos. A photo (of 'reality') is at its very best, at very best, already just a representation of the subject. Both are (technically) fake, aren't they?
- andybak 4y ago
  There's a rather important distinction between an image of reality and a purely synthetic image. I'm really not sure what point you are making.
  - IndySun 4y ago
    A photograph of reality can and often does look 'unreal', or odd, or fake. So many, many, aspects cause this; lighting, expressions caught mid point, even the colour. My point is, the invitation is nether a robust or an intriguing one. Nevertheless, it is a success for other reasons.
hsn915 4y ago
It seems like the real face is always the less "perfect" one
hyperific 4y ago
The teeth were a big giveaway for me. The gap between the central incisors should roughly line up with the nose but the fakes are almost always noticably offset.
- carlmr 4y ago
  I knew Tom Cruise wasn't real.
jxramos 4y ago
I’m viewing this on a mobile device so I can’t zoom in too efficiently to do all the subtle detail stuff. What I caught onto was the real photos were subtly messy with imperfections. The AI ones have this idealized look to them that has a slight airbrushed effect in aggregate. If people’s faces had blemishes or imperfect skin it’s more likely real. Somehow those imperfections get chopped in AI, probably because they’re so idiosyncratic they don’t survive the AI transformations which look at features en masse.
- SideburnsOfDoom 4y ago
  > What I caught onto was the real photos were subtly messy with imperfections. ON a bigger screen, I would say in the AI ones, the fake hair is "subtly messy with imperfections" - it's a bit like a weave or rug in places, not correctly modelling strands.
- cruano 4y ago
  Even a person wearing glasses messes up with the A.I., look at the image on the left: https://www.whichfaceisreal.com/results.php?r=1&p=1&i1=image-2019-02-18_094533.jpeg&i2=21704.jpeg https://www.whichfaceisreal.com/results.php?r=1&p=1&i1=image...
  - carlmr 4y ago
    And the person on the right here looks airbrushed though. So this might be a closer call with another image.
gnicholas 4y ago
Earrings are often a tell — many generated images have mismatched earrings, or just one ear with an earring.
Markoff 4y ago
just look at outlines, especially EARS area or earings at women, AI can't make real ears yet, face is already OK (though AI can't really make skin imperfections), but ears are giveaway tried 3, got all correct, no point to waste my time anymore, same issues as always with these photos
i_like_apis 4y ago
StyleGAN artifacts are too easy to spot. I was 20 for 20.
stefs 4y ago
trivially easy if you look at the artefacts around the faces.
- carlmr 4y ago
  True, I got 9 out of 10 correct, just looking at the hairtifacts. Howdver I might be fooled by this if I wasn't primed to look for which one is fake and which one isn't. I got 1 incorrectly because it was bad quality and photography which created artifacts of its own.
syva 4y ago
New captcha challenge?
coreyisthename 4y ago
The backgrounds are a dead giveaway for me most of the time. Granted, I’m a professional photographer and spend a lot of time looking at photos taken with various lenses, so have become pretty familiar with depth of field and all that jazz. That, or the backgrounds have the weird discombobulated shapes and structures that only vaguely resemble real things, which I’ve also noticed in other AI generation tools. Either way, it still fools me sometimes and it’s pretty remarkable how quickly this has all been happening.
- relaxing 4y ago
  As a photographer what started throwing me off was back focus issues in the synthetic images. I assume if anything the GAN would generate an image that was uniformly sharp, but I kept seeing images where the focus was just past the subject's eyes, more around the ears and hairline. Just like a real autofocus system might lock onto shirt fabric or something.
darkwater 4y ago
For all the people boasting about how easily they can detect it: yes, you have to deeply look at possible artifacts (especially in teeth/ears) but sometimes it's not that easy and I'm pretty sure it would fool most of the population, especially if not giving a reference, real image on the side. Photoshopped images can also be spotted easily by keen eyes, but they still do their job, which is deceiving the majority. Edit: typos
- thom 4y ago
  This is a bit like chess puzzles. When you know there’s some winning tactic, you’ll sit and look for it until you find it. But in most real positions in actual games you don’t know and sometimes have to trust your gut as to whether to spend time on the details. If you know one picture is fake you’ll find it. If it’s just a social media avatar, you’ll assume it’s a real person. That said, even without looking deeply for weird smooshy patterns, inconsistent curves, lack of symmetry or nonsense clothing, the biggest giveaway is that most AIs are pretty bad a realistic lighting. I got most of these at a glance because it’s a very pronounced difference.
- andybak 4y ago
  I've spent a lot of time playing with AI image gen and I had to think really hard about most of them. I can confidently say I would be fooled by nearly all of them if I wasn't on the lookout.
- gehsty 4y ago
  As an avatar on twitter or wherever 100% would trick me, if I even clicked the image to take a closer look I wouldn’t know if it’s the compression by the social network or the image being generated…
- jcims 4y ago
  Also the model is trained on faces, not backgrounds. Pretty soon we’re going to see entire 3D scenes generated and rendered photorealistically through a camera model.
  - relaxing 4y ago
weird-eye-issue 4y ago
Showing green when you are correct or not is a really good UI move
aszantu 4y ago
ai still doesn't get the eyes right^^, got 8/10 right if it's not the eyes it's patterns in the hair that return
kgeist 4y ago
My detection ratio was 100% successful and I didn't pay attention to anything in particular, it just clicked. I don't know what gave it away. I suspect that is because I looked through so many pics on thispersondoesnotexist.com, my brain's own neural network learned how to detect them (which is still a blackbox to the consciousness).
- curiousgal 4y ago
  It's the background.
sendfoods 4y ago
This was surprisingly easy when looking out for artifacts. StyleGAN2 significantly reduces artifacts, i'd be very interested to see StyleGAN2 on this website as well!
sublinear 4y ago
Some of these are just straight up insane fever dreams if you evaluate the entire photo instead of just the face. After easily getting 80%+ correct, I had to stop. It wasn't from boredom, but getting creeped out by how grotesque some of these fakes were.
fergie 4y ago
I mean you can just about tell when you know for sure that one is fake, but this is scary.
anotheryou 4y ago
Already very outdated
baseonmars 4y ago
The blending between background and hair are the real give-away. Some of the faces are really quite convincing.
hansbo 4y ago
On a slightly related note, whenever I see a generated face with other faces in the background, and those faces are warped in strange ways, I get a very unpleasant sensation, like a chill going up my spine. Does anyone else get this? Example: https://imgur.com/a/eK0jMZx https://imgur.com/a/eK0jMZx. I can look at it after getting used to it, but at first glance I have to look away.
- cnity 4y ago
  Yes, it actually makes me feel slightly sick.
lambda_dn 4y ago
Never got one wrong, pretty obvious to anyone with eyes. What's the point of the site?
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
PH01 4y ago
There is at least one person with five incisors between their canines in the real face camp.
otikik 4y ago
Software is good at making faces now, but concentrating on the the periphery (background, ears, earrings) is still easy to spot a fake. Also computers don’t know how hands look, at all.
- otikik 4y ago
  Just tried it on desktop. Way more noisy artifacts inside the faces with bigger resolution. At the scale shown on mobile they are barely noticeable (for me).
guilbep 4y ago
not fun super easy
guilbep 4y ago
Glad it's too easy.
oldgradstudent 4y ago
It told me that the following is the real face: https://www.whichfaceisreal.com/realimages/02794.jpeg https://www.whichfaceisreal.com/realimages/02794.jpeg
- Xaiph_Rahci 4y ago
  So the entire website is just for training
  - d11z 4y ago
    This is absolutely what’s happening.
- craigmart 4y ago
  looks real to me
  - oldgradstudent 4y ago
    Reality has much higher polygon count, and much better texture mapping.
- CharlesW 4y ago
  That doesn't look like anything to me.
z3phyr 4y ago
All the images with people in background have real faces so far
sandworm101 4y ago
Where is the proof? How can we trust that this website is honest about which are using real and fake faces? This might be some grad student's psychology experiment, or some artist's comment on our understanding of reality. If you can fake a face, you can fake a website. If i wanted to sell a database of "real faces" i moght just generate them myself using AI and sell them to researchers as real, forever polluting such tests. That would certainly clear up any copyright issues.
- etiennebausson 4y ago
  I can get 80% 'real' without even looking at the visages, which are indistinguishable to me, but by focusing on the background. On this selection at least, those with blured /unicolor background are fakes, and true pictures regularly have interesting things in the background. Not hard to change, but it does tell me that the website is probably honest with its data so far.
  - sandworm101 4y ago
    Or they have fooled you by offering a simplistuc red herring.
- bee_rider 4y ago
  If the trick were that both were generated, shouldn’t we occasionally get cases where both are clearly fake?
powerapple 4y ago
I wonder if it is possible that a generated face matches a real face. A person with real face is detected by algorithm as unreal and cannot access facilities.
TheWoodsy 4y ago
The biggest tell for me after ears, hair and backgrounds was hard-lighting. None of these generation models 'learn' shadows with point-like lighting.
Komodai 4y ago
bearmode 4y ago
Interesting, but after doing about 50 I found I was getting the correct answer 100% of the time
adenozine 4y ago
I got 18 in a row before I missed. There's something around the corner of the eyes that's weird, but I'll be damned if I could figure out how exactly to articulate it.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
cemoktra 4y ago
pretty easy. mostly there are artifacts in the background/hairs
maxperience 4y ago
You only need to look for pimples or blemishes on the skin. Thats how you know what the real face is.
- cgearhart 4y ago
  Yep. Everyone is focused on the background, but you don’t need that—all the fake faces look too perfect.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
bjt2n3904 4y ago
Easiest thing for me right now is the background. If it has blurry and screwed up bokeh or random patterns, it's probably the fake one. If there's something incredibly detailed, but blurred, it's probably real.
FartyMcFarter 4y ago
The faces look pretty good for the most part, but there a few things that usually give away the generated photos: - artifacts in backgrounds; - weird patterns in clothes; - clothes that are very ill-fitting.
roel_v 4y ago
I feel bad for the people where I thought 'this one is too ugly/asymmetrical to be real', and then they turn out to be the real ones...
- leereeves 4y ago
  Real people have imperfections. If it looks like an airbrushed photo, it was probably generated by an AI trained on airbrushed photos.
TrackerFF 4y ago
I'm getting them all correct - just look at the hair, that's the simplest way to tell IMO. The edges are blurred and weird looking.
cocochanel 4y ago
Getting all of them correct I got bored and stopped.
nicgrev103 4y ago
I think if the background was removed it would be harder.
yoz-y 4y ago
Good about 10 misses in a row, never once had the correct one (and I was trying)...
trinovantes 4y ago
I found the professional headshots hardest to tell since real ones purposely bokeh blur the background which gives the glowy edges around the hair
lampshades 4y ago
I did like 20 and missed 1.
humanlity 4y ago
9/10, is amazing
steve_adams_86 4y ago
Eerie. It seems like most people here could tell, but with my morning vision and on my phone screen I did terribly. Not sure if it’s because I can’t see as clearly as usual or I have some deficiency in identifying faces.
forinti 4y ago
I got the first 3 wrong, then I started looking at the necks and the background and got all of them right (although not always 100% certain I was going to get it). A few of them to have some artifacts on the face that give it away, but this is very impressive.
- JLCarveth 4y ago
  I only got one wrong and it's because I clicked through a little quick. To me it's almost immediately apparent by looking at the skin texture / how the hair looks. The AI is particularly "wavy" and doesn't look like normal skin. Edit: Doing it a couple more times, you can tell pretty much instantly.
  - forinti 4y ago
    Teeth also give it away.
XCSme 4y ago
The necks give it away.
tajstar 4y ago
I always find these "which is real" comparisons interesting because there is always some type of distrotion around the borders of the face, like the AI has a good idea what a face looks like but things get fuzzy when it tries to create the stray hairs a person always has sticking out.
trhatx 4y ago
We rarely see real faces any more in photographs or videos. On YouTube Biden looks like 60 and without wrinkles, everyone uses tons of filters. Perhaps that is the reason people are doing badly in these tests.
atum47 4y ago
Fake images seems to always carry artifacts on them. I just looked for them and got 100% right.
jeffbee 4y ago
Too easy! StyleGAN always puts a characteristic weird blob somewhere on the edge of the image.
rajman187 4y ago
I played about 10 of them and got them all right. It’s very impressive, but I just happened to know that ears and teeth are particularly problematic for these generative models (for now).
gwbas1c 4y ago
The pointer shouldn't turn into a magnifying glass when I hover over a picture. That signals that I can zoom in and look at details more closely. Use a normal pointer.
budafish 4y ago
The real image loads faster for me than the fake one. So I just click the first picture and it's correct.
natch 4y ago
100% right for 10 minutes on an iPhone (zooming in as needed). Other giveaways I haven’t seen mentioned in the discussion: vague earrings (fake). Coherent details in glasses reflections (real). If second person in picture has good details, probably real. Second person has bad details, too easy, fake. Gratuitous wisps of disconnected hair, fake. Actual clearly coherent finely detailed design on glasses frames or clothing, real.
andrewla 4y ago
Don't play this game! All you're doing to creating free training data for the next generation of adversarial face generation.
Asmod4n 4y ago
All Fake ones I saw have the same „jpeg“ like artifacts in the face, and the hair always looks strange.
donatj 4y ago
The background is enough to get me 9/10 of these.
some_random 4y ago
I really wish it tracked your accuracy
exabrial 4y ago
are we just training someone's model?
jedberg 4y ago
Any picture with more than one person is real. If there is a second partial face, or a shoulder or hair, or any other sign of another human, then it's the real one. They need to clean up their data, unless they're testing for people figuring that out.
advisedwang 4y ago
This site was put up in 2019 presumably with images from 2015-2019 era algorithms. This was early in the viability of these image generation techniques, so the authors work is kind of precinct. However the state of the art of image generation has moved - I suspect a 2022 version of this would be substantially harder.
NaturalPhallacy 4y ago
Oddly enough I was rocking 100% accuracy by ignoring the face and looking at the background. Maybe a face-centric ML isn't so good at backgrounds. Shocker!
MiddleEndian 4y ago
In contrast with everyone else, I struggled a lot with this when just looking at the faces. I made twenty attempts and got ten successes and ten failures. After reading other comments, when attempting again by looking at the backgrounds, I tried ten more times and went nine and one. But I believe I am somewhat face-blind. I have never understood how people were able to describe faces to the cops to make those mockups of criminal suspects. I also struggle to recognize faces sometimes, including celebrities and new dating partners. At a past job, I remember thinking two of my coworkers were the same coworker until I saw them at the same lunch outing and it suddenly clicked. I recently got confused by two characters in an action movie with less than a dozen characters total, and realized shortly after that they had different ethnicities.
- yakubin 4y ago
  Similar here. Although my inability to distinguish faces is only mild. But for the longest time I thought Donna Noble[1] and Sarah Jane Smith[2] were the same character. They still look the same to me, modulo the wrinkles. [1]: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donna_Noble https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donna_Noble> [2]: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Jane_Smith https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Jane_Smith>
yakubin 4y ago
Apparently this face is real: <https://www.whichfaceisreal.com/realimages/59264.jpeg https://www.whichfaceisreal.com/realimages/59264.jpeg>. If you say so, I guess.
slowhand09 4y ago
I went thru 12 I think. One miss. Irregular pupils were what I keyed on.
ng-user 4y ago
I agree with another commenter that "Which face is real?" is somewhat easy to determine. In this scenario, it's A or B. You already know one face is fake, and one is real. It would be substantially more challenging if the question was rather "Can you spot all the AI generated faces?" and it turns out 40% of the time there is no AI generated face at all. AI vs. Real can become somewhat easy to identify over multiple repetitions - AI vs. Real, Real vs. Real, AI vs. AI. are all scenarios that should be included to increase the difficulty imo.
DrNosferatu 4y ago
Amazing! I can only guess the fake ones because I know how AI / GANs work and I know the weaknesses.

235 points by GamerUncle 4y ago

ki_ 4y ago

Faces are great, but the backgrounds are wrong, also clothing, ears sometimes and there are strange circles here and there. i get ~19/20 correct.

Medox 4y ago
shadows also help in identifying the real person.

can16358p 4y ago

It's usually the glitchy artifacts which give the clues. Not the face itself, bur what's around it/background/other objects etc. Check for weird-looking "something's not right" objects/backgrounds and you'll get most of it fine.

strken 4y ago
I got five in a row without looking for glitches or background objects, then stopped. Look really carefully at a small area of skin. See if wrinkles, pores, hairs, and minor skin imperfections are present. See if they make sense in the context of the rest of the face.

xeyownt 4y ago

I find the result impressive. I'm sure this fools a majority of people, contrary to the comments here. Obviously, with detailed analysis, you can probably spot the difference, but in day-to-day activity, and without knowing that one picture is fake, you will fool even more.

number6 4y ago
In this context you are looking for fakes, but on a website with Sales Person Avatars e.g. in a Chat I wouldn't search for fakes. I wouldn't assume the Avatars are the real persons either but yeah persons...

jayceedenton 4y ago

I'd love to see what images from the training set look most similar to a given generated face. It's hard to decide whether these are impressive without knowing whether each face is just a real face with some minor adjustments.

andybak 4y ago
You can take a photo not in the training set and usually find a close match. So in a sense almost any photo matches an AI generated one with "minor adjustments".

skc 4y ago

Dead simple if you just focus on the ears. Every single fake image has poorly rendered ears, which makes perfect sense as the contouring would be hard to get right for an AI

mdjt 4y ago
And the teeth

anotheraccount9 4y ago

After 5 minutes, I got tired and started seeing some of the same pictures again. 100% right all the time. For me, the trick is to assess the background, ear shape, synthetic textile (if any), and skin conditions.

Keyframe 4y ago
Outside of any obvious anomalies, telling sign seems to be AI generates eyes symmetrical on the center of the screen.
- RiverBucketShoe 4y ago
  yeah. but if this were randomized or corrected, it would be A LOT harder for me personally.
Pompidou 4y ago
Skin is more glossy in theses IA photos than it should be.
shipman05 4y ago
+1 to the background trick. Faces were pretty convincing, but the generated backgrounds all seemed to have a generic filler appearance.
- stiiv 4y ago
  For me, the backgrounds were interesting for their _more salient_ features rather than their ambience, e.g. unexpected smears of color, textures that vaguely looked like real things at a glance (like fabric or nature) but wouldn't stand up to scrutiny. They reminded me of the typical "mistakes" that you see when playing around with image generators.
  - dwringer 4y ago
    My heuristic in picking the fake one was to examine the fabric - the fake ones are all wearing what seems to be Dan Flashes.

drippingfist69 4y ago

Has we we trained AI to tell the difference?

notum 4y ago

Eyes and backgrounds. Easy peasy, 10/10. Backgrounds should be generated by a different model and face should be pasted in, now that would be a real challenge! Models that fix eyes already exist.

itslennysfault 4y ago
Or just use real background images and composite an AI face on top. The question which face is real so using the background is kinda "cheating" imo. So using a real photo for the background eliminates that technique to cheat.
Strom 4y ago
I also got 10/10, but by looking at ears and facial hair. There's a long way to go for a test like this. That said, if I didn't know I was looking for artifacts, all of those pictures would be passable at a glance.
lqet 4y ago
There are almost always these strangely colored, flare-like artifacts in the background or on the skin. Looking for those, I also easily scored 10/10.
fh973 4y ago
Ears and teeth artifacts, if present. If the head is rotated slightly, the faces, especially the cheeks are getting slightly distorted in the artificial images.

mkl95 4y ago

So far it struggles with ears, neck, and hair

LocalH 4y ago

It's the background. The faces look half decent but all the AI backgrounds are fucked in some way. After a few misses getting my bearings I started getting nearly 100% success rate, and within a second and a half in most cases.

JetAlone 4y ago

At first I was tricked a handful of times, but I trained myself in what to look for. At first uneven blemishes proved a useful heuristic, but then when I looked deeper I found the edges and backgrounds were even more effective. The fakes somehow feel like they are in this... Oily world of illusions.

philliphaydon 4y ago

I got the first 5 wrong because I thought I was meant to pick the computer, not the real person. After that I did ~20, got them all correct. There's alot of tells. Glasses make the edge of the eyes look strange. Around the ears, hats, sometimes the backgrounds etc, the blurs are wrong or corrupt. However, if I didnt know 1 of the 2 were generated, I wouldn't look for anything and would probably just assume it's real, unless there was real obvious corruption on the face.

signaru 4y ago

On a streak so far. I'm playing "can you tell which picture has a non blurry background and has no artifacts?" edit: My first mistake is when I thought a piece of fabric on a human was unusually warped.

latency-guy2 4y ago
My game is looking at the eyes, seems like the model has a tendency to make faces that have pretty much mirrored eye shapes and sockets, pupils being clear of imperfections or just plain circles or even both pupils being identical to each other, tilt is also a huge issue, most of the AI images have their output "looking directly into the lens" and nearly perpendicular to the aperture, real humans are off center in more ways than one in all of these aspects and more, as well as having numerous orientations To me, looking at the background is kind of cheating to sus out facial features, after all we are trying to figure out if the face is real not the background
- dreamer7 4y ago
  True, in most cases, backgrounds with a lot of elements (ex: a house in the background) were part of real pictures
  - hnbad 4y ago
    Typically in AI generated images another giveaway is that when the head covers the entire height of the picture, the background may randomly change between the left and right side in implausible ways.
- jffhn 4y ago
  >My game is looking at the eyes I look at the hairs. In real images you can see their fine threaded structure, in fake ones it's rather blurry and inconsistent.
- rpastuszak 4y ago
  Looking at the ears has worked for me 100% of time.

shorthistory 4y ago

human trains GAN model --> GAN model trains human

stevewatson301 4y ago

I'll simply observe that it is easy to tell a fake face when presented an either/or choice and when specifically asked to. Most of the time we aren't looking as closely, so while I see some commenters being very happy about their accomplishments, I don't personally see a reason to rejoice. Regardless, the AP news article[1] linked under the "methods" page provides some useful reading on how to detect these faces, for anyone interested. [1] https://apnews.com/article/ap-top-news-artificial-intelligence-social-platforms-think-tanks-politics-bc2f19097a4c4fffaa00de6770b8a60d https://apnews.com/article/ap-top-news-artificial-intelligen...

adql 4y ago
You can also look for artifacts but yeah, it could have both faces generated by AI and in many cases you wouldn't be able to tell. If you know how to look for imperfections and quirks it's easier but ain't nobody doing it for just a image without "this might be AI" context
bippingchip 4y ago
This is a very important distinction. With deliberate attention, you can indeed catch many fakes in this kind of scenario (to me it seems the background is often a giveaway, but you do need to focus on it) But in passing, accompanying a news article, a tweet or an instagram post, are you paying as much attention? Those are the scenarios where the potential for harm is much bigger.
dmichulke 4y ago
Here's the important paragraph (I made it bullet points): ... reeled off a list of digital tells that he believes show the Jones photo was created by a computer program, including - inconsistencies around Jones’ eyes, - the ethereal glow around her hair and - smudge marks on her left cheek
- Puts 4y ago
  For me I didn't even look at the face. To me the obvious giveaway that made me spot all of them was, first of all the unnatural bokeh that you see in all AI images that don't look like anything a camera would produce. And the second thing is looking at clothing that folds in strange ways.

hacsky 4y ago

Look not at the face but around the ears and the backgrounds.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

Brajeshwar 4y ago

Seems like I have been looking and playing around with too many of these AI-Generated imagery! I got the first 15-odd all correct.

siraben 4y ago

Since this uses StyleGAN, it's relatively easy to tell when an image is fake or real, since the networks seems to have trouble with backgrounds and faces that are directly adjacent to the main face. However, since diffusion models are all the rage now, I think we would perform significantly worse with landscapes or images of fruits and animals, especially if the task is "distinguish between the real and fake art".

jrootabega 4y ago

Muriel Bowser is in there.

nitwit005 4y ago

It asks to click on the person who is "real", which gets a bit strange when "real" seems to be someone in green contacts and a wig for cosplay: https://www.whichfaceisreal.com/realimages/12481.jpeg https://www.whichfaceisreal.com/realimages/12481.jpeg Biggest issue seems to be a number of images of people consuming their deformed selves: https://www.whichfaceisreal.com/fakeimages/image-2019-02-18_165449.jpeg https://www.whichfaceisreal.com/fakeimages/image-2019-02-18_... https://www.whichfaceisreal.com/fakeimages/image-2019-02-17_222220.jpeg https://www.whichfaceisreal.com/fakeimages/image-2019-02-17_...

brettermeier 4y ago
Well, even Cos-players are real persons...
- nitwit005 4y ago
  They're a real person doing their best to look like a fake person.

everyone 4y ago

This game seems quite easy. When I know one of them is computer generated and one not, it's easy to pick the real one. Like a multiple choice question is much easier than otherwise. I didnt get a single one wrong, and am now playing with the rule that I have to decide within a few seconds, still all right. Still, they're pretty good, If one of the CG images came up by itself in the course of other business I wouldn't bat an eyelid.

kagaw 4y ago

I suggest to develop an AI that can tell which one is a robot or a human

philshem 4y ago
Isn't that what we are training when we complete tasks on these sites?!

spaintech 4y ago

Eyes, teeth, and Ears, that’s my endgame… plenty of anomalies there, took me about one per second to get 20 right in a rows then I stopped playing. I figured I was trining the the system… your welcome!

dalmo3 4y ago

My hypothesis was "children are always real". Got about 15 right before a fake child appeared.

thatjoeoverthr 4y ago

Perfect score, but it’s such an impressive technology. Traditional graphics with triangles and ray tracing are fake at a glance, but here you need attention to detail and a bit of wit.

shimonabi 4y ago

I got 9/10 correct.

trentearl 4y ago

After doing 30 I was able to differentiate very quickly, it's surprising how easy it is to detect these. You can tell by abnormalities in ears and AI probably wont show you hands because it struggles a lot. The backgrounds often look correct but dont make architectural sense. I also noticed if I dont look at the person in the eyes it sometimes is a tell, I'm not sure why though.

darepublic 4y ago

After a while I could determine the fakes by carefully scrutinizing the ears. On first impression I can't tell them apart though

shever73 4y ago

Same as the other commenters, I got the first couple wrong, but then quickly realised what I was looking for. You can see artefacts in the skin of many of the faces, and often the ears were the giveaway.

lvncelot 4y ago

I found that in direct comparison, the background often was enough to tell the difference - but that was mostly because one of the images had a detailed background with text or architecture, which I know the AI would struggle with. I think a similar test that is not asking for a direct comparison but just "is this image real?" would be much harder, since there is no better "safe" choice to fall back on.

bagels 4y ago

20/20 chosen correctly. Yes I think I can. The AI images are very impressive, but there are always artifacts that give it away.

IndySun 4y ago

Is this a serious topic worthy of serious responses from high ranking HN readers? Depressing. They're both photos. A photo (of 'reality') is at its very best, at very best, already just a representation of the subject. Both are (technically) fake, aren't they?

andybak 4y ago
There's a rather important distinction between an image of reality and a purely synthetic image. I'm really not sure what point you are making.
- IndySun 4y ago
  A photograph of reality can and often does look 'unreal', or odd, or fake. So many, many, aspects cause this; lighting, expressions caught mid point, even the colour. My point is, the invitation is nether a robust or an intriguing one. Nevertheless, it is a success for other reasons.

hsn915 4y ago

It seems like the real face is always the less "perfect" one

hyperific 4y ago

The teeth were a big giveaway for me. The gap between the central incisors should roughly line up with the nose but the fakes are almost always noticably offset.

carlmr 4y ago
I knew Tom Cruise wasn't real.

jxramos 4y ago

I’m viewing this on a mobile device so I can’t zoom in too efficiently to do all the subtle detail stuff. What I caught onto was the real photos were subtly messy with imperfections. The AI ones have this idealized look to them that has a slight airbrushed effect in aggregate. If people’s faces had blemishes or imperfect skin it’s more likely real. Somehow those imperfections get chopped in AI, probably because they’re so idiosyncratic they don’t survive the AI transformations which look at features en masse.

SideburnsOfDoom 4y ago
> What I caught onto was the real photos were subtly messy with imperfections. ON a bigger screen, I would say in the AI ones, the fake hair is "subtly messy with imperfections" - it's a bit like a weave or rug in places, not correctly modelling strands.
cruano 4y ago
Even a person wearing glasses messes up with the A.I., look at the image on the left: https://www.whichfaceisreal.com/results.php?r=1&p=1&i1=image-2019-02-18_094533.jpeg&i2=21704.jpeg https://www.whichfaceisreal.com/results.php?r=1&p=1&i1=image...
- carlmr 4y ago
  And the person on the right here looks airbrushed though. So this might be a closer call with another image.

gnicholas 4y ago

Earrings are often a tell — many generated images have mismatched earrings, or just one ear with an earring.

Markoff 4y ago

just look at outlines, especially EARS area or earings at women, AI can't make real ears yet, face is already OK (though AI can't really make skin imperfections), but ears are giveaway tried 3, got all correct, no point to waste my time anymore, same issues as always with these photos

i_like_apis 4y ago

StyleGAN artifacts are too easy to spot. I was 20 for 20.

stefs 4y ago

trivially easy if you look at the artefacts around the faces.

carlmr 4y ago
True, I got 9 out of 10 correct, just looking at the hairtifacts. Howdver I might be fooled by this if I wasn't primed to look for which one is fake and which one isn't. I got 1 incorrectly because it was bad quality and photography which created artifacts of its own.

syva 4y ago

New captcha challenge?

coreyisthename 4y ago

The backgrounds are a dead giveaway for me most of the time. Granted, I’m a professional photographer and spend a lot of time looking at photos taken with various lenses, so have become pretty familiar with depth of field and all that jazz. That, or the backgrounds have the weird discombobulated shapes and structures that only vaguely resemble real things, which I’ve also noticed in other AI generation tools. Either way, it still fools me sometimes and it’s pretty remarkable how quickly this has all been happening.

relaxing 4y ago
As a photographer what started throwing me off was back focus issues in the synthetic images. I assume if anything the GAN would generate an image that was uniformly sharp, but I kept seeing images where the focus was just past the subject's eyes, more around the ears and hairline. Just like a real autofocus system might lock onto shirt fabric or something.

darkwater 4y ago

For all the people boasting about how easily they can detect it: yes, you have to deeply look at possible artifacts (especially in teeth/ears) but sometimes it's not that easy and I'm pretty sure it would fool most of the population, especially if not giving a reference, real image on the side. Photoshopped images can also be spotted easily by keen eyes, but they still do their job, which is deceiving the majority. Edit: typos

thom 4y ago
This is a bit like chess puzzles. When you know there’s some winning tactic, you’ll sit and look for it until you find it. But in most real positions in actual games you don’t know and sometimes have to trust your gut as to whether to spend time on the details. If you know one picture is fake you’ll find it. If it’s just a social media avatar, you’ll assume it’s a real person. That said, even without looking deeply for weird smooshy patterns, inconsistent curves, lack of symmetry or nonsense clothing, the biggest giveaway is that most AIs are pretty bad a realistic lighting. I got most of these at a glance because it’s a very pronounced difference.
andybak 4y ago
I've spent a lot of time playing with AI image gen and I had to think really hard about most of them. I can confidently say I would be fooled by nearly all of them if I wasn't on the lookout.
gehsty 4y ago
As an avatar on twitter or wherever 100% would trick me, if I even clicked the image to take a closer look I wouldn’t know if it’s the compression by the social network or the image being generated…
jcims 4y ago
Also the model is trained on faces, not backgrounds. Pretty soon we’re going to see entire 3D scenes generated and rendered photorealistically through a camera model.
- relaxing 4y ago

weird-eye-issue 4y ago

Showing green when you are correct or not is a really good UI move

aszantu 4y ago

ai still doesn't get the eyes right^^, got 8/10 right if it's not the eyes it's patterns in the hair that return

kgeist 4y ago

My detection ratio was 100% successful and I didn't pay attention to anything in particular, it just clicked. I don't know what gave it away. I suspect that is because I looked through so many pics on thispersondoesnotexist.com, my brain's own neural network learned how to detect them (which is still a blackbox to the consciousness).

curiousgal 4y ago
It's the background.

sendfoods 4y ago

This was surprisingly easy when looking out for artifacts. StyleGAN2 significantly reduces artifacts, i'd be very interested to see StyleGAN2 on this website as well!

sublinear 4y ago

Some of these are just straight up insane fever dreams if you evaluate the entire photo instead of just the face. After easily getting 80%+ correct, I had to stop. It wasn't from boredom, but getting creeped out by how grotesque some of these fakes were.

fergie 4y ago

I mean you can just about tell when you know for sure that one is fake, but this is scary.

anotheryou 4y ago

Already very outdated

baseonmars 4y ago

The blending between background and hair are the real give-away. Some of the faces are really quite convincing.

hansbo 4y ago

On a slightly related note, whenever I see a generated face with other faces in the background, and those faces are warped in strange ways, I get a very unpleasant sensation, like a chill going up my spine. Does anyone else get this? Example: https://imgur.com/a/eK0jMZx https://imgur.com/a/eK0jMZx. I can look at it after getting used to it, but at first glance I have to look away.

cnity 4y ago
Yes, it actually makes me feel slightly sick.

lambda_dn 4y ago

Never got one wrong, pretty obvious to anyone with eyes. What's the point of the site?

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

PH01 4y ago

There is at least one person with five incisors between their canines in the real face camp.

otikik 4y ago

Software is good at making faces now, but concentrating on the the periphery (background, ears, earrings) is still easy to spot a fake. Also computers don’t know how hands look, at all.

otikik 4y ago
Just tried it on desktop. Way more noisy artifacts inside the faces with bigger resolution. At the scale shown on mobile they are barely noticeable (for me).

guilbep 4y ago

not fun super easy

guilbep 4y ago

Glad it's too easy.

oldgradstudent 4y ago

It told me that the following is the real face: https://www.whichfaceisreal.com/realimages/02794.jpeg https://www.whichfaceisreal.com/realimages/02794.jpeg

Xaiph_Rahci 4y ago
So the entire website is just for training
- d11z 4y ago
  This is absolutely what’s happening.
craigmart 4y ago
looks real to me
- oldgradstudent 4y ago
  Reality has much higher polygon count, and much better texture mapping.
CharlesW 4y ago
That doesn't look like anything to me.

z3phyr 4y ago

All the images with people in background have real faces so far

sandworm101 4y ago

Where is the proof? How can we trust that this website is honest about which are using real and fake faces? This might be some grad student's psychology experiment, or some artist's comment on our understanding of reality. If you can fake a face, you can fake a website. If i wanted to sell a database of "real faces" i moght just generate them myself using AI and sell them to researchers as real, forever polluting such tests. That would certainly clear up any copyright issues.

etiennebausson 4y ago
I can get 80% 'real' without even looking at the visages, which are indistinguishable to me, but by focusing on the background. On this selection at least, those with blured /unicolor background are fakes, and true pictures regularly have interesting things in the background. Not hard to change, but it does tell me that the website is probably honest with its data so far.
- sandworm101 4y ago
  Or they have fooled you by offering a simplistuc red herring.
bee_rider 4y ago
If the trick were that both were generated, shouldn’t we occasionally get cases where both are clearly fake?

powerapple 4y ago

I wonder if it is possible that a generated face matches a real face. A person with real face is detected by algorithm as unreal and cannot access facilities.

TheWoodsy 4y ago

The biggest tell for me after ears, hair and backgrounds was hard-lighting. None of these generation models 'learn' shadows with point-like lighting.

Komodai 4y ago

bearmode 4y ago

Interesting, but after doing about 50 I found I was getting the correct answer 100% of the time

adenozine 4y ago

I got 18 in a row before I missed. There's something around the corner of the eyes that's weird, but I'll be damned if I could figure out how exactly to articulate it.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

cemoktra 4y ago

pretty easy. mostly there are artifacts in the background/hairs

maxperience 4y ago

You only need to look for pimples or blemishes on the skin. Thats how you know what the real face is.

cgearhart 4y ago
Yep. Everyone is focused on the background, but you don’t need that—all the fake faces look too perfect.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

bjt2n3904 4y ago

Easiest thing for me right now is the background. If it has blurry and screwed up bokeh or random patterns, it's probably the fake one. If there's something incredibly detailed, but blurred, it's probably real.

FartyMcFarter 4y ago

The faces look pretty good for the most part, but there a few things that usually give away the generated photos: - artifacts in backgrounds; - weird patterns in clothes; - clothes that are very ill-fitting.

roel_v 4y ago

I feel bad for the people where I thought 'this one is too ugly/asymmetrical to be real', and then they turn out to be the real ones...

leereeves 4y ago
Real people have imperfections. If it looks like an airbrushed photo, it was probably generated by an AI trained on airbrushed photos.

TrackerFF 4y ago

I'm getting them all correct - just look at the hair, that's the simplest way to tell IMO. The edges are blurred and weird looking.

cocochanel 4y ago

Getting all of them correct I got bored and stopped.

nicgrev103 4y ago

I think if the background was removed it would be harder.

yoz-y 4y ago

Good about 10 misses in a row, never once had the correct one (and I was trying)...

trinovantes 4y ago

I found the professional headshots hardest to tell since real ones purposely bokeh blur the background which gives the glowy edges around the hair

lampshades 4y ago

I did like 20 and missed 1.

humanlity 4y ago

9/10, is amazing

steve_adams_86 4y ago

Eerie. It seems like most people here could tell, but with my morning vision and on my phone screen I did terribly. Not sure if it’s because I can’t see as clearly as usual or I have some deficiency in identifying faces.

forinti 4y ago

I got the first 3 wrong, then I started looking at the necks and the background and got all of them right (although not always 100% certain I was going to get it). A few of them to have some artifacts on the face that give it away, but this is very impressive.

JLCarveth 4y ago
I only got one wrong and it's because I clicked through a little quick. To me it's almost immediately apparent by looking at the skin texture / how the hair looks. The AI is particularly "wavy" and doesn't look like normal skin. Edit: Doing it a couple more times, you can tell pretty much instantly.
- forinti 4y ago
  Teeth also give it away.

XCSme 4y ago

The necks give it away.

tajstar 4y ago

I always find these "which is real" comparisons interesting because there is always some type of distrotion around the borders of the face, like the AI has a good idea what a face looks like but things get fuzzy when it tries to create the stray hairs a person always has sticking out.

trhatx 4y ago

We rarely see real faces any more in photographs or videos. On YouTube Biden looks like 60 and without wrinkles, everyone uses tons of filters. Perhaps that is the reason people are doing badly in these tests.

atum47 4y ago

Fake images seems to always carry artifacts on them. I just looked for them and got 100% right.

jeffbee 4y ago

Too easy! StyleGAN always puts a characteristic weird blob somewhere on the edge of the image.

rajman187 4y ago

I played about 10 of them and got them all right. It’s very impressive, but I just happened to know that ears and teeth are particularly problematic for these generative models (for now).

gwbas1c 4y ago

The pointer shouldn't turn into a magnifying glass when I hover over a picture. That signals that I can zoom in and look at details more closely. Use a normal pointer.

budafish 4y ago

The real image loads faster for me than the fake one. So I just click the first picture and it's correct.

natch 4y ago

100% right for 10 minutes on an iPhone (zooming in as needed). Other giveaways I haven’t seen mentioned in the discussion: vague earrings (fake). Coherent details in glasses reflections (real). If second person in picture has good details, probably real. Second person has bad details, too easy, fake. Gratuitous wisps of disconnected hair, fake. Actual clearly coherent finely detailed design on glasses frames or clothing, real.

andrewla 4y ago

Don't play this game! All you're doing to creating free training data for the next generation of adversarial face generation.

Asmod4n 4y ago

All Fake ones I saw have the same „jpeg“ like artifacts in the face, and the hair always looks strange.

donatj 4y ago

The background is enough to get me 9/10 of these.

some_random 4y ago

I really wish it tracked your accuracy

exabrial 4y ago

are we just training someone's model?

jedberg 4y ago

Any picture with more than one person is real. If there is a second partial face, or a shoulder or hair, or any other sign of another human, then it's the real one. They need to clean up their data, unless they're testing for people figuring that out.

advisedwang 4y ago

This site was put up in 2019 presumably with images from 2015-2019 era algorithms. This was early in the viability of these image generation techniques, so the authors work is kind of precinct. However the state of the art of image generation has moved - I suspect a 2022 version of this would be substantially harder.

NaturalPhallacy 4y ago

Oddly enough I was rocking 100% accuracy by ignoring the face and looking at the background. Maybe a face-centric ML isn't so good at backgrounds. Shocker!

MiddleEndian 4y ago

In contrast with everyone else, I struggled a lot with this when just looking at the faces. I made twenty attempts and got ten successes and ten failures. After reading other comments, when attempting again by looking at the backgrounds, I tried ten more times and went nine and one. But I believe I am somewhat face-blind. I have never understood how people were able to describe faces to the cops to make those mockups of criminal suspects. I also struggle to recognize faces sometimes, including celebrities and new dating partners. At a past job, I remember thinking two of my coworkers were the same coworker until I saw them at the same lunch outing and it suddenly clicked. I recently got confused by two characters in an action movie with less than a dozen characters total, and realized shortly after that they had different ethnicities.

yakubin 4y ago
Similar here. Although my inability to distinguish faces is only mild. But for the longest time I thought Donna Noble[1] and Sarah Jane Smith[2] were the same character. They still look the same to me, modulo the wrinkles. [1]: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donna_Noble https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donna_Noble> [2]: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Jane_Smith https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Jane_Smith>

yakubin 4y ago

Apparently this face is real: <https://www.whichfaceisreal.com/realimages/59264.jpeg https://www.whichfaceisreal.com/realimages/59264.jpeg>. If you say so, I guess.

slowhand09 4y ago

I went thru 12 I think. One miss. Irregular pupils were what I keyed on.

ng-user 4y ago

I agree with another commenter that "Which face is real?" is somewhat easy to determine. In this scenario, it's A or B. You already know one face is fake, and one is real. It would be substantially more challenging if the question was rather "Can you spot all the AI generated faces?" and it turns out 40% of the time there is no AI generated face at all. AI vs. Real can become somewhat easy to identify over multiple repetitions - AI vs. Real, Real vs. Real, AI vs. AI. are all scenarios that should be included to increase the difficulty imo.

DrNosferatu 4y ago

Amazing! I can only guess the fake ones because I know how AI / GANs work and I know the weaknesses.