
Which Face Is Real? - tom_mellior
http://www.whichfaceisreal.com/
======
cdoxsey
Seems like the best way to tell is to not actually look at the face so much as
the details around it. There are often obvious glitches in the background.

~~~
jules
I got 10 out of 10 correct without looking at the features around the face.
It's easy to spot the fake one by wrinkles going the wrong way, or obvious
artifacts like incomplete earrings. It's close to being impossible for me to
tell, though, if they fixed those issues.

~~~
asteli
My method was more intuitive than that. There's more detail on the real faces,
the fake ones look slightly brushed over. If it wasn't an A/B test, I'd fall
for the fakes every time, however.

~~~
brokentone
Oddly I succeeded using the exact opposite strategy.

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tgb
There's a super easy machine learning algorithm to generate faces: nearest
neighbor.

Joking aside, how do I know they're not doing this? I don't have their dataset
so are these people really very "novel" or just slightly messed up existing
photos? I have the same concerns with recent writing AI that's been making
headlines. It's too good and I swear it's just copying a couple sentences from
here and a couple from there, or near enough so as to make no difference.

~~~
Someone
They likely use
[https://github.com/NVlabs/stylegan](https://github.com/NVlabs/stylegan).
NVidia recently released it, and suddenly sites like this one and
[https://thiscatdoesnotexist.com](https://thiscatdoesnotexist.com) pop up.

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goda90
I think a better game would be to show several faces, and have the user pick
which one(s) are not real. With just a side by side of a real vs fake, it's
pretty easy to tell from contextual clues.

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gambler
I've worked with 2D graphics quite a bit and I've often used anisotropic
smoothing[1]. GAN images have similar artifacts (probably worth thinking
about, btw), which are trivial to spot if you know what you're looking for.
They look like waves on water[2].

One could mask these artifacts by blurring, adding noise or downscaling
further.

[1] -
[https://authors.library.caltech.edu/6498/1/PERieeetpami90.pd...](https://authors.library.caltech.edu/6498/1/PERieeetpami90.pdf)

[2] Extreme example:
[https://c1.staticflickr.com/9/8449/8048065891_7fab061307.jpg](https://c1.staticflickr.com/9/8449/8048065891_7fab061307.jpg)

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CodeCube
Am I the only one who assumes the people running this site are using the data
to feed/teach the algorithm to be more accurate in the future? Like, any time
the 'fake' face gets chosen, it gets added to the training dataset of what
'works'.

~~~
ElijahLynn
[http://www.whichfaceisreal.com/methods.html](http://www.whichfaceisreal.com/methods.html)

"On this website, we present pairs of images: a real one from the FFHQ
collection, and a synthetic one, as generated by the StyleGAN system and
posted to thispersondoesnotexist.com, an web-based demonstration of the
StyleGan system that posts a new artificial image every 2 seconds."

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Gpetrium
I noticed a lot of folks in here are putting the emphasis on the 'this is how
I spotted the fake' which is extremely valuable on its own, however, have you
thought about the potential practical outcomes and unintended consequences.

Its amazing to think about the implications of being able to create faces that
look real. It can have an impact on police questionnaires, future holograms,
may be used to adulterate security camera's data and so many others. I wonder
if we will be able to keep up with the changes in technology to protect what
society holds dear.

~~~
CodeCube
re: security camera data ... just look at DeepFakes. The train has already
left the station there

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vicarrion
Knowing that one is fake you can take the time to pick it out, but these could
easily pass as real photos in a context where you're not looking for them.

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ddebernardy
The game is somewhat simple to beat. Just pick the quirky face -- i.e. the one
couldn't realistically be generated using a combination of a collection of
faces. A blurrier background is sometimes a giveaway too.

The game would be harder if the real faces were less asymmetrical in detail
(no hats, etc.). And a lot harder if you needed to pick all of the real (or
fake) faces, rather than pick the real one knowing the other is false.

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kisstheblade
Well maybe this "face" is real but it isn't a "person". I hope, or maybe I'm
getting too old :)

[http://www.whichfaceisreal.com/results.php?r=0&p=0&i1=fakeim...](http://www.whichfaceisreal.com/results.php?r=0&p=0&i1=fakeimages/image-2019-02-18_151939.jpeg&i2=realimages/13885.jpeg)

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eddietejeda
Impressive. But, the one that loads first is always the real person. The teeth
for generated faces often look weird.

~~~
runjake
> But, the one that loads first is always the real person

I tested your theory and the loading order was a mixed bag. The first loaded
definitely isn't the real person. It's about 50/50 here.

~~~
dzek69
depends on location

it's a pity that one image is progressive jpeg and another is baseline

this makes me always see which one is real

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abbiya
[http://www.whichfaceisreal.com/realimages/](http://www.whichfaceisreal.com/realimages/)

[http://www.whichfaceisreal.com/fakeimages/](http://www.whichfaceisreal.com/fakeimages/)

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void_nill
I have tried it 50 times and had only three wrong answers. The best method _in
this case_ to recognize a fake face is to look at the background. In many
cases you can see considerable disturbances.

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jslabovitz
I'll go out on a personal limb here and say that I mostly failed in my
guesses, with perhaps 80% incorrect.

I have some degree of faceblindness (often can't recognize someone I know well
if they've changed something like makeup or hairstyle or clothing), as well as
difficulty in picking up nonverbal cues. I wonder whether brain differences
like this might affect image recognition?

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afpx
The fake images would look a more real if they just post-processed them
through one of the popular face-enhancing apps.

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ThePadawan
I found a reliable criterion to be "Does this person have a consistent eye
line?", i.e. do their eyes indicate they are focusing roughly at the camera
distance.

I would assume that that is a bias of the "real" photographs, because who
would keep a picture where the subject doesn't look at the camera.

~~~
dragonwriter
> who would keep a picture where the subject doesn't look at the camera.

Anyone shooting candids; even lots of portraits have the subject looking off
into the distance or somewhere else other than at the camera. I mean, sure, if
your are shooting for a photo ID, you won't keep a shot that isn't directly
looking at the camera, but...

(Which isn't to say it's not a real bias in genuine photos, just not as
absolute as you seem to suggest it should be expected to be.)

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jalgos_eminator
[http://www.whichfaceisreal.com/results.php?r=0&p=0&i1=fakeim...](http://www.whichfaceisreal.com/results.php?r=0&p=0&i1=fakeimages/image-2019-02-18_130910.jpeg&i2=realimages/00544.jpeg)

I wonder where they get their real images from...

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danlugo92
This one was easy, look at that headgear! hahaha.

[http://www.whichfaceisreal.com/fakeimages/image-2019-02-17_1...](http://www.whichfaceisreal.com/fakeimages/image-2019-02-17_114258.jpeg)

~~~
vokep
Seem's it couldn't decide between hair or beanie, so it just went with both

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anjc
It's interesting how, aside from a few infrequent and slight glitches, the
artificial faces look perfect, but yet we still intuitively know which one is
real based on lots of other cues (the background, the pose etc).

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IncRnd
It appears that the picture with a detailed background is the picture of a
real person. I choose a sequence of pictures, without looking at the faces,
and I was able to use only the background correctly answer each time.

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ElijahLynn
This is part of the project Calling Bullshit, a course on calling bullshit.

[https://callingbullshit.org/syllabus.html](https://callingbullshit.org/syllabus.html)

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wuxb
I keep getting it right after the first failure. And my brain learned it very
quick: (1) The background is distorted. (2) Their eyes are open but their
irises are not round enough.

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0db532a0
Reminds me of a website I came across years ago where you had to tell a
paedophile from a computer science professor. It really was sometimes quite
different to tell.

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noiv
Am I an introvert if trust my image manipulation know-how and purpose
detection sensor array more than my human instincts in the quest this web site
proposes?

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deadmik3
the real one loads almost instantly and the generated one takes noticeably
more time. you should preload them both because it became obvious pretty
quickly

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dbieber
I hope they're collecting data on how long it takes someone to answer, not
just whether people answer correctly or incorrectly.

~~~
jcims
It would be good to let folks scribble on the tells. I had to resort to
earring comparison a few times to break a tie on facial features.

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rilut
The fake faces are mostly looks flatter (no facial wrinkle at all) than the
original face or sometimes has too much wrinkles

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Johnny555
I got 5/5 just by looking at lighting, including the background -- the
pictures with the better lighting were fake.

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ackbar03
So nvidia opens source the code and everyone's suddenly scraping something
together from it on the web...

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echlebek
I never picked a wrong answer, even after 15 tries, but the generated faces
certainly look convincing.

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berbec
The ML seems to not generate backgrounds that are as realistic. That's gotten
me to 12 in a row.

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danbee
I don't know if this is true for anybody else, but the real image always loads
first.

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ErikAugust
Next up: HotOrNot for GAN faces.

~~~
jcims
Or catfish as a service

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theresistor
My favorite fake was a very plausible looking professional headshot... with a
patchy 5 o'clock shadow. The GAN behind this clearly hasn't figured out that
while well-groomed beards are acceptable in headshots, patchy shadows are not.

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wanderfowl
This is really neat, but pupil roundness is a dead giveaway here.

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1auralynn
The giveaways are weird-looking teeth and background artifacts.

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p3nt3ll3r
There is a lag - the generated one comes second.

