From synthesizing speech in anyone’s voice to synthesizing an image of a fictional person and swapping one person’s identity with another or altering what they are saying in a video, AI-synthesized content holds the power to entertain but also deceive.
Synthetically generated faces are not just highly photorealistic, they are nearly indistinguishable from real faces…. Perhaps most interestingly, we find that synthetically generated faces are more trustworthy than real faces. This may be because synthesized faces tend to look more like average faces which themselves are deemed more trustworthy.
Regardless of the underlying reason, synthetically generated faces have emerged on the other side of the uncanny valley.
This should be considered a success for the fields of computer graphics and vision. At the same time, easy access to such high-quality fake imagery has led and will continue to lead to various problems, including more convincing online fake profiles and—as synthetic audio and video generation continues to improve—problems of nonconsensual intimate imagery, fraud, and disinformation campaigns, with serious implications for individuals, societies, and democracies.
