Four of these faces were produced entirely by AI... can YOU tell who's real? Nearly 40% of people got it wrong in new study

Recognizing the difference between a real photo and an AI-generated image is becoming increasingly difficult as the deepfake technology becomes more realistic. Researchers at the University of Waterloo in Canada set out to determine whether people can distinguish AI images from real ones. They asked 260 participants to label 10 images gathered by a Google search and 10 images generated by Stable Diffusion or DALL-E – two AI programs used to create deepfake images – as real or fake. The researchers noted that they expected 85 percent of participants to be able to accurately identify the images, but only 61 percent of people guessed correctly. The study, published in Springer Link, found that the most common reasons people identified the images as real or fake were by looking at details like the eyes and hair while other, more generalized reasons, were that the picture'looked weird.' Participants were allowed to look at the pictures for an unlimited amount of time and focus on the little details, something they most likely wouldn't do if they were just scrolling online – also known as'doomscrolling.'