Do you think you can thwart the traps of Fakes News and recognize all the shots generated by AI? Don’t be so sure! To be clear, do this little online test.
The Internet is completely fascinated by AI capable of generating incredible images from a simple textual demand – which is called a prompt -, and in just a few seconds. Midjourney, Imagen 3 by Google, Grok on X or even “Images in Chatgpt” … This technology has never been more at fingers! It was therefore not necessary to wait a long time before images generated by the internet, strongly encouraged by social networks, which see there a means of producing ever more content and increasing the “commitment” of users.
But if we override the fun side of the thing, the generation of images by AI, and especially its simplicity of access, poses big problems with regard to the propagation of Fake News. We could believe we are intelligent enough to know how to distinguish between what is real and what is not, but we would be wrong! A recent study by Microsoft reveals that our capacity to identify IA images is “Barely higher than that of a battery or face game”. This hurts our ego!
To carry out this study, the researchers submitted more than 12,500 people in the world a quiz called “real or not?” The principle is simple: this online test has a series of 15 images and it is necessary to indicate for each if it has been generated by an AI or not. And it turns out that, on nearly 287,000 responses, the average success rate was only 62 %.
Note that the participants were more relevant on human faces, with a score of 65 %, but failed more when it comes to landscapes or urban scenes, with a resulting result at 59 %. This would be explained by the fact that our brain would be programmed to easily recognize human faces. Microsoft, however, specifies that the subject images were not particularly complex or trashy.
Test
Researchers explain these results by the rapid evolution of generative AI “displaying even more realistic results”while specifying that their results “Probably overestimate the ability of people today to distinguish the images generated by the AI of real images”.
In reality, the best way to recognize an image generated by AI is … to use AI detection tools, which are much more reliable than humans. By way of comparison, that of Microsoft obtained a success rate exceeding 95 %! You can also test your identification capacity by making the quiz. Take your time, observe the details well, because it is far from easy!
