Fake faces created by artificial intelligence (AI) are considered more trustworthy than images of real people, a study has found. The results highlight the need for safeguards to prevent deep fakes, which have already been used for revenge porn, fraud and propaganda, the researchers behind the report say. The study – by Dr Sophie Nightingale from Lancaster University in the UK and Professor Hany Farid from the University of California, Berkeley, in the US – asked participants to identify a selection of 800 faces as real or fake, and to rate their trustworthiness. After three separate experiments, the researchers found the AI-created synthetic faces were on average rated 7.7% more trustworthy than the average rating for real faces. This is "statistically significant", they add.

Fake faces created by artificial intelligence (AI) are considered more trustworthy than images of real people, a new study has found. The results highlight the need for safeguards to prevent deep fakes, which have already been used for revenge porn, fraud and propaganda, the researchers behind the report say. The study - by Dr Sophie Nightingale from Lancaster University in the UK and Professor Hany Farid from the University of California, Berkeley, in the US - asked participants to identify a selection of 800 faces as real or fake, and to rate their trustworthiness. After three separate experiments, the researchers found the AI-created synthetic faces were on average rated 7.7% more trustworthy than the average rating for real faces. This is "statistically significant", they add.