Video asking which people are real and which are AI is ‘terrifying’ as viewers ‘can’t tell the difference’

If you were presented with a gallery of faces, some real and some AI generated, you'd know which is which, right?

Well, a pair of videos on TikTok has done just that, and many viewers have been left baffled by just how difficult it can be to tell the difference between the real and the AI faces.

In an age where it has become all too easy to misdirect and misrepresent, generating a convincing AI face could have all sorts of illicit applications.

But what sort of thing could these applications actually be?

Well, if you were someone who was criminally-minded, you could use an AI-generated face as part of a phishing scam.

Having a profile picture is a way to make a fake profile appear more credible. The problem is if you use someone else's picture then the game could easily be up, but if you use an AI generated picture, then it adds an extra layer of anonymity.

You also don't end up using the same picture several times.

So, you might have a profile picture on LinkedIn for a fictional business, or generate a fake dating profile on Tinder to try and trick someone.

TikTok / theoracly

What is unnerving is that with the video and the gallery, posted by @theoracly on TikTok, it can be difficult to tell which faces are real and which are fake, even with the knowledge that some definitely are fake.

In the real world browsing the web, you wouldn't be primed with the knowledge that some images in a line-up weren't real.

The video showed up a gallery of portrait photos, with viewers invited to guess which was real and which wasn't.

Sounds easy, right? Unfortunately for a large number of people it was unnervingly difficult to guess.

But others claimed that they had figured out the trick to knowing which was which.

TikTok / @theoracly

People took to the comments to share their alarm at being unable to tell the real from the fake.

One wrote: "They all look real to me. I can't tell the difference."

A second wrote: "Which is frankly terrifying because no longer is a picture evidence. We can’t trust what we see anymore. Reality is exhausting."

So what was the trick? People claimed it was in the eyes.

One replied: "You can tell by their eyes..their pupils don't make a perfect circle."

A second wrote: "It really is in the eye reflection. the tiny tiny detail of the eye reflection. once i focused on that, it became easier to do."

How many did you get right?