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by nmarinov 1384 days ago
I read the "How to recognize an image of a fake person" section on the site you linked and I'm curious how did you spot that the pictures are fake?
5 comments

If you see enough of these AI-generated portraits on the Internet you'll start to notice the similarities, especially since This Person Does Not Exist is usually the source for the vast majority of them that I've seen. They're very often used as profile pics by Twitter bots.

The way the person's head is framed in the shot is pretty much identical most of the time and kind of a tell on its own.

Other tells:

- steve.jpg: The skin above the top rim of his glasses has some repetition/distortion.

- customer1.jpg: Distortion in the hair, most noticeable at top left. Mouth looks fake too.

- customer3.jpg: I didn't notice anything significant, but it just looks like an image taken straight off TPDNE. Do "vibes" count?

- customer4.jpg: The teeth merge into each other.

Another tell is that they often look cropped from a larger image, specifically not from the center. Lenses produce specific distortions towards the edges. It looks like to increase the corpus of images many headshots have been cropped from larger images. This causes the model to learn and replicate these subtle lens effects.
> - customer3.jpg: I didn't notice anything significant, but it just looks like an image taken straight off TPDNE. Do "vibes" count?

Look at the background, does it make sense? Tell me what the background to the left of hear head is. Look at her earbobs, how often do people wear different ones in each ear? Does the left earbob look like anything?

Hmm, thanks. To me those look like random compression artefacts or poor photo retouching but I get what you mean and they do all look similar.

I guess you can get used to the distortions and the general vibe of the model.

For me a big giveaway on customer3.jpg is earrings - they don't have a real shape and don't match at all.
Good catch.
Go to https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/ and spend a few minutes refreshing the page. There's something distinctive about all these fake faces - I can't explain what it is, but once you've seen enough of them you can recognise the "look" quite easily.

Probably the biggest giveaway is that the faces are all positioned identically in each photo, but there's something else that juuuust quite doesn't look real. Maybe some of the faces just seem a little bit more androgynous than anyone I ever see in real life. There's something about them that sits just on the edge of the uncanny valley.

Outside from the odd file names, minor details like ears, glasses, earrings.

Our friend Steve has something going on with the left hinge of his glasses.

Customer1 has an interesting right ear.

Customer3 has very asymmetrical earrings.

Customer4 has a bulge where the left earring would normally be, and the right hinge of their glasses is crooked.

I think the image names gives it away more.

"customer1.jpg" and "steve.jpg" lol

Usually eyes are not completely symmetrical.