White AI faces judged human more often than actual human faces

cyu@sh.itjust.worksbanned from community to Technology@lemmy.world – 203 points –
47

It doesn't help that all the humans have beauty filters on

Yeah, they got that 'no pores' look that selfie filter give, that's somewhat uncanny looking.

Human male 40 absolutely does not have a filter, that's probably why he rated as the most human looking human.

Not only that but several of them are a bit weird looking (sorry to those people...) as in, 37 and 47 have obvious asymmetries, 31 is a bit bug-eyed, 18 seems to have been taken with a super telephoto lens or have a really flat face.

This reminds me of an argument I saw here last week about AI and its use as a grammar checker. You can definitely do it, but you’re going to have all the markers of using AI to cheat.

Not really, if you write the text first and only apply minor changes to fix the grammer (and not rewrite entire sentences) no AI detector will detect that because the sentence structure and pattern wouldn't match typical AI output.

Be sure to remember that, at best, AI takes prompts as interpretable guidelines and a request of “grammar checking” can involve some additional, unwarranted, restructuring. Points to whoever notices both AIisms that I noticed that chatgpt added to my grammar checked critique on grammar checking.

I feel like that "corporate wants you to find the differences between these two photos" meme. Isn't everyone in those photos, in both the top and bottom rows, white?

Edit: Ah, I see, OP has given this a highly misleading title. The "whiteness" of the faces is not actually particularly relevant. In another thread someone summarized what the article is actually about:

For anyone who doesn’t want to read the paper, they basically took an 60 white men and 60 white women, and showed them a whole bunch of white faces, half of which were generated by AI. It turns out that AI faces were rated as more human-like than actual humans, and they had some hypothesis why. Principally that AI, by its nature, generates images close to “average”, while real people tend to have features that are not “average”. The reason the study focused on white people is that most AI have been trained on white faces, so AI tends to do better with white faces.

An op? Making a misleading title? On Lemmy?

Man, it's as if the severe lack of moderation and rules that so many people wanted when moving from Reddit is hurting the quality of posts on here.

Fr fr nobody ever wrote a clickbait headline on reddit.

You know there is a significant difference between it being a thing you might see occasionally versus an ongoing issue?

Yeah, and it was an ongoing issue with Reddit. Probably still is. Sure, small, niche subreddits that had active moderation were generally free of the scourge. But it was quite a common phenomenon across the site, in my experience.

how is it only a thing you might see occasionally on reddit? I saw misleading titles daily when I still used that site.

@cyu Could you add “white” between “actual” and “human”?

It turns out that AI faces were rated as more human-like than actual humans

I tried guessing from the ArsTechnica article and got a whopping 1 out of 8 correct.

Imagine being one of those people with a face people think is AI generated.

It’s the “living on Null street” problem of the future

Are you seriously going to tell me that human male 47 is real

I do not believe you

His skin is simply too smooth, plus his eyes are at different angles and the perspective is wrong

I feel like real faces were heavily edited, which made them lose a lot of realism. I do get uncanny valley looking at some of them.

Now show us hands.

Not really much of an issue with SXDL any more, and even SD1.5 got quite good at the end. Admittedly haven't stress-tested either, though (things like clasping hands etc). It's also not a hand-specific thing, it just happens more commonly with fingers because they're small features:

The thing that happens is that diffusion-type interference first nails down gross structure (which limb is where) and then fills in details. Sometimes steps somewhere in the middle decide that a limb should be somewhere else, though, and suddenly you have two, and if steps immediately after don't think "that old limb doesn't look like it should be there" and erase it, later steps will happily refine both to photorealism because they don't even look at the overall composition. That is, it's not an issue with anatomical knowledge, or not having seen enough hands, but the model changing its mind but not backtracking. It's actually astonishing how good it can get at not making that mistake without being able to tell that it has two competing goals in mind.

Remember when you could've just look them in the eyes, and if they were in the center it was not a real human?

Such is the miracle of sufficiently trained autoencoders

So.. sidebar. Hang on.

When human simulacra start to approach realism, they go into the “uncanny valley” once they’re pretty good but still obviously off. What’s after the uncanny valley once they’re totally convincing? Is there even a name for that?

It's a valley. Meaning you be either before, in, or after. We are after

Creppy to think that none of those faces are real but at the same time do look just like real people.

Could you add “white” between “actual” and “human”?

I am uncomfortable to say that I failed 3 of the human ones. In my defense, the guy on the bottom right has pointed teeth like Sweet Tooth

Damn human female 31 and AI female 44 can get it tho.

I don't remember where I first saw it, but it's become a favorite saying: Isn't it funny how it only takes a pretty face to make you want to put someones genitals in your mouth?

Kinda makes sense, right?

The AI images are a representation of what an AI thinks a human "should" look like, so when another AI (likely trained on a similar dataset) tries to classify them, the AI images will more closely fit what it expects a human to look like.

This is a classification made by humans, not by AI

Ahh, you'll be unsurprised to hear I didn't actually read the paper. Thanks for correcting me.

That said, I still generally stand by my comment. While that makes this finding much more interesting, it does also make sense that the AI faces look like what our brains recognize as human.

It does make sense indeed. But it also means AI has become very good in matching our expectations. We have reached a level of very good AI

Exactly. The AIs job is to generate humanness. The things that don’t look human get discarded, the things that have strong human indicators get kept. Oh look, the AI did its job. Shocked pikachu.

The white thing is probably just a case of biased training data. Which is going to be a problem across all AIs. I wouldn’t be surprised if in 5-10 years (if the fad lasts longer than NFTs lmao) we find out the ‘AIs’ have all been fed biased data as yet another means of large corporations controlling the narrative of the population.

It's very odd, because "white" is not the color of any actual human being's face. Look at the white background against this text. Have you ever actually seen anybody that color? Unless they're coated in whitewash, you have not. Human skin is a complex blend of many different colors from pink to orange to brown to beige and many others also. Every human person is a composition. Nobody is actually white, black, red, or yellow. We're all colors, blended together. Some are lucky enough to have dark complexions that shine like the finest of earth's woods and minerals.

Ah, you seem confused. "White" is colloquially used to refer people descended from Europeans, particularly the Caucuasus region, due to them typically having much lighter skin tones then people from other regions.

There's no rational, scientific connection between the Caucasus and the American race term. I'm not even sure if Americans would consider Caucasians all that white, given that many of them are muslim; like the Chechen ethnicity.

The term comes from an old theory that said that humanity started out in the Caucasus and spread from there, people becoming darker as they were exposed to more sun. The guy who made that theory wasn't racist, but his work was used by racists (and he railed against that, saying things like "there's villages in Africa with greater artistic and philosophical output than [European region where one of his racist "admirers" was from]"). He was a scientist and interpreted archaeological evidence -- which we now understand to be the evidence for the Urheimat, and spread of, Indo-European people. Who came to the Caucasus, just like everyone else, from Africa, but that evidence hadn't been unearthed yet. (Technically the Urheimat is probably the Ukrainian plains, not mountains, but close enough).

All that is 2000-3000 years before the Pyramids.

There's actually multiple different mutations which contribute to whiteness, all caused by the double-whammy of not getting as much vitamin d from the sun, and not getting as much vitamin d from meat with the advent of agriculture. Pre-agricultural Europeans (hunter-gatherers, pastoralists) were actually quite a bit tanner than we are now, the original Proto-Indo-Europeans were (very probably) nomadic cattle herders and thus probably also tanner, agriculture and another set of whiteness genes came from the Euphrat/Tigris region.

The term comes from an old theory that said that humanity started out in the Caucasus and spread from there, people becoming darker as they were exposed to more sun.

Not quite. The guy who coined the term, Blumenbach, believed that the Caucasians (in particular the Georgians) were the most beautiful and therefore must have been the original humans. Maybe "old theory" means the biblical belief that "Noah's Ark" stranded in the Caucasus Mountains. I don't know that Blumenbach used that as a justification. Biblical race doctrines defined races as descent from different sons of Noah.

The Caucasians are certainly far from the palest people on the planet. The south of the region is part of Turkey and Iran. Those are maybe the most well-known countries and the region and I'm sure that no one pictures very pale people. I remember an article about the considerable diplomatic and PR efforts that Turkey undertook in the early 20th century to be made a white country under US law. I wish I could recall the details.

2 more...