Fake faces created by AI look more trustworthy than real people

Artificial intelligence can create such realistic human faces that people can't distinguish them from real faces – and they actually trust the fake faces more. Fictional, computer-generated human faces are so convincing they can fool even trained observers. They can be easily downloaded online and used for internet scams and fake social media profiles. "We should be concerned because these synthetic faces are incredibly effective for nefarious purposes, for things like revenge porn or fraud, for example," says Sophie Nightingale at Lancaster University in the UK. AI programs called generative adversarial networks, or GANs, can learn to create fake images that are less and less distinguishable from real images, by pitting two neural networks against each other.