Facing up to AI: Are you Fooled by a Fake Face? [Dr Sophie Nightingale]

Facing up to AI: Are you Fooled by a Fake Face?
Dr Sophie Nightingale, University of Lancaster

The advent of generative artificial intelligence (GAI) has taken the ability to generate fake content to a new level. Early approaches using Generative Adversarial Networks became popular for image synthesis around 2018 with the inception of NVIDIA’s StyleGAN architecture. Since then, the emergence of more powerful AI-based diffusion models has democratised access to image synthesis—allowing almost anyone to create diverse images via simple text prompts. These diffusion models bring new uncertainty around image authenticity. AI-generated imagery can have positive uses, however, nefarious exploitation of these images is often seen in the political sphere, and wider harms include financial fraud and catfishing. As GAI becomes increasingly sophisticated and accessible, this in turn increases concerns about people’s ability to sort real faces from fake ones and raises questions around how these technologies might lead to an erosion of trust in societal and democratic institutions and processes.
In this talk I will discuss research examining people’s ability to distinguish between real and AI-generated faces. I will present the results from a series of experiments examining the realism and trustworthiness of faces generated using 1) Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) and 2) AI-based diffusion models.

Sophie is a Senior Lecturer in Psychology at Lancaster University. Her research interests mainly focus on the intersection of technology with human cognition and behaviour, particularly in security, legal, and forensic contexts.
Her work covers a range of topics including drawing on psychological and computational techniques to improve the detection of digitally manipulated/synthesised media and examining issues of bias and fairness in the application of technology. She currently holds a Future Leaders Fellowship and previously completed her postdoc at the University of Berkeley, California and PhD at the University of Warwick.