Recognition of real and artificial intelligence-generated faces

Artificial intelligence (AI) is changing society in major ways. AI can create content that entertains, but it can also mislead people. One part of this change is the ability to produce human-like AI content, including voices and faces. In psychology, AI-generated faces have started to be used to study face perception, thanks to their flexibility and convenience. This choice appears to be supported by recent evidence indicating that AI-generated faces are indistinguishable from human faces. However, other findings suggest that AI- or computer-generated faces may be evaluated differently than real faces, with AI-generated faces even leading to hyperrealism. To address this, we conducted a study to investigate whether human and AI-generated faces are recognized similarly in a memory task, and whether their recognition is related to our evaluation of these faces. Results show that recognition accuracy was significantly higher for AI faces than for real faces. Critically, classification (i.e., the ability to correctly classify a face as human or AI-generated) accuracy was significantly better than chance level for both real and AI-generated faces, with no difference between the two. These results suggest that humans can correctly discriminate AI-generated and human faces, and that AI-faces might be recognized better than human ones, suggesting that AI-generated faces might engage human perceptual and memory systems differently from real faces. However, recognition and classification accuracy were not significantly correlated, suggesting that participants might be partially unaware of their increased performance with AI-generated faces.