Are You a Super-Recognizer? AI Faces Are Harder Than Ever to Identify

When critics forecast the terrible future of artificial intelligence, they generally focus on the concept of AI "slop" that will overwhelm us with low-quality facsimiles of real human work. But what about when AI can do things so well that they're indistinguishable from the real thing?

A new paper published in the journal Royal Society Open Science reveals where we are with AI-generated stills of human faces: They are now essentially indistinguishable from real photos. Worryingly, the paper shows that this can be true even for people who have been explicitly trained to find the telltale signs of AI generation.

The study was simple enough. Researchers in the United Kingdom gathered a control group of normal people and an experimental group of "super-recognizers" who have shown a high aptitude for facial recognition, but crucially have not received training in finding AI faces.

The control group correctly identified only 30 ...