Can you tell real faces from fake AI-created ones? It's tough! Plus: Facebook's chief AI scientist talks hardware

I see a hint of a shadow: on the fake woman's neck, and on the fake chap the right side is darker. Bear in mind that clear shadows come from sunlight or powerful artificial light, and won't exist in many perfectly-real photos.

The fake woman at the top seemed obvious to me. The mix of mostly-young features with a definitely-old crowsfoot by the eye. But the fake chap, with no pretensions to be either young or old, has no such easy giveaway - to my eye, at least.

Yann LeCun, Facebook’s AI veep and chief scientist

Anything involving Facebook cries out for a subtly placed "t" at the end ..

Whatever your AI detection rule is, there will be a real world counter

The problem is that we're getting closer to the algorithms we as humans use. Asymmetry is not as uncommon as you think - I recall a photography study where they mirrored facial halves to form a face, shadows and reflections can be calculated once the facial geometry is defined, even facial colour differences can have a natural origin.

There is no absolute rule or certainty, it's a game of probabilities. You can probably tweak them upwards, but the idea that there is a definite, absolute, binary yes/no algorithm out there is a tad unrealistic.

I seemed to be pretty good at 'Which Face Is Real?'

Got the first one wrong, learned what the differences were, and next six all correct. Then I got bored.

It's some form of human learning algorithm. Very powerful stuff, but difficult to explain to the layman. "You show humans a few images, and they seem to work it out for themselves."

I seemed to be pretty good at 'Which Face Is Real?'

I saw "Alita Battle Angel" at the cinema this weekend, and came fairly rapidly to the conclusion that "Alita" sat in the uncanny valley for me *despite* the best attempts of the SFX crew. If only I had a spare £100 or so to afford the (anglicised) original manga... For some reason I find them more immersive than a movie.

Saying that, I must be getting old, I'd had enough of watching cyborgs being torn to pieces before I'd got half way through the film.

I hate the bastards doing this.

It only takes a couple of seconds to realise how this is going to end up creating more problems than solutions.

A little bit of NVidia magic, a dabble of Facebook profiling, a little bit of magic fairy powdering snapchat/instagram powder and you are suddenly an internet meme with all the worst possible unthinkable habits, and it's all on video ......whether you want it or not....

This isn't even Tinfoil hat imaginary scenarios, this is now and it's real....

So what's new?

This new story appears to say no more than "We trained a computer on several million real faces and now it can draw something that resembles them.". I see no *new* threat to society here.

If I want a photo that looks like a human being doing something of my choice, there is this pre-existing technology called "acting" that has sufficed for over a century. If I want a photo that looks like a particular person doing something, we have technology for wrapping one person's face around another person's head. It has been around for a decade or two. It started off really expensive and is now relatively cheap, but as a society we seem to be coping. Perhaps it is the case that for cases where it really matters whether the video is real or not, there are ways to corroborate things. Perhaps people are slowly wising up to the fact that "the camera never lies, except nearly all of the time".

Perhaps

Theyve looked at the Daily Mail? plenty of fake faces to be seen there.

Natural Language

As far as I know, the computer can only understand numbers, signs, and words. That is, to understand an image it must be described by numbers, signs and words. Means everything that is in the computer falls under Natural Language.

Traffic signals

If the sensors can’t detect a green light, human drivers have to take over

Pah. This is Boston. Just count the number of cars illegally passing you on the sidewalk - that will tell you when it's appropriate (it's never safe) to go.

That said, autonomous vehicles won't succeed in Boston until they have a configurable contempt level, like Scud the Disposable Assassin.