AI is getting better and better at generating faces — but you can train to spot the fakes
Even the most skilled face recognizers are duped by AI-generated faces, a new study finds. But they can improve with training.
AI can now generate hyperrealistic images of faces (top row), making them difficult to distinguish from photos of real faces (bottom row). (Image credit: Gray et al, Royal Society Open Science 12250921 (2025) CC-BY-4.0)
Images of faces generated by artificial intelligence (AI) are so realistic that even "super recognizers" — an elite group with exceptionally strong facial processing abilities — are no better than chance at detecting fake faces.
People with typical recognition capabilities are worse than chance: more often than not, they think AI-generated faces are real.
"I think it was encouraging that our kind of quite short training procedure increased performance in both groups quite a lot," lead study author Katie Gray, an associate professor in psychology at the University of Reading in the U.K., told Live Science.
Surprisingly, the training increased accuracy by similar amounts in super recognizers and typical recognizers, Gray said. Because super recognizers are better at spotting fake faces at baseline, this suggests that they are relying on another set of clues, not simply rendering errors, to identify fake faces.
Gray hopes that scientists will be able to harness super recognizers' enhanced detection skills to better spot AI-generated images in the future.
"To best detect synthetic faces, it may be possible to use AI detection algorithms with a human-in-the-loop approach — where that human is a trained SR [super recognizer]," the authors wrote in the study.
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Detecting deepfakes
In recent years, there has been an onslaught of AI-generated images online. Deepfake faces are created using a two-stage AI algorithm called generative adversarial networks. First, a fake image is generated based on real-world images, and the resulting image is then scrutinized by a discriminator that determines whether it is real or fake. With iteration, the fake images become realistic enough to get past the discriminator.
These algorithms have now improved to such an extent that individuals are often duped into thinking fake faces are more "real" than real faces — a phenomenon known as "hyperrealism."
As a result, researchers are now trying to design training regiments that can improve individuals' abilities to detect AI faces. These trainings point out in AI-generated faces, such as the face having a middle tooth, an odd-looking hairline or unnatural-looking skin texture. They also highlight that fake faces tend to be .