UVic researchers looking to help people spot deepfake AI images<\/p>\n
Published 1:45 am Tuesday, June 30, 2026<\/p>\n
A recent University of Victoria study suggests that humans have been successfully trained to spot computer-generated faces from from photos of real human faces \u2013 also known as deepfakes.<\/p>\n
The UVic Different Minds Lab team, led by psychology professor Jim Tanaka and post-doctoral fellow Eric Mah, partnered with the Australian National University (ANU) to develop a quick, effective and robust training technique for improving people\u2019s detection of deepfake faces, in research paper published by Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.<\/p>\n
AI-generated deepfake faces have become so realistic that it is difficult for people to tell them apart from photos of real humans, contributing to increases in AI-related fraud, according to a UVic release. The researchers trained people to spot AI-generated faces by drawing their attention to six perceptual qualities: distinctiveness, memorability, proportionality, symmetry, attractiveness and expressiveness.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was amazing to see the dramatic improvement in people\u2019s ability to detect AI faces,\u2019\u2019 noted Amy Dawel, associate professor and director of the ANU lab in a news release. \u201cWe\u2019ve shown our training is effective for some of the most convincing fakes available \u2013 StyleGAN faces. Now we need to find out whether that training generalises to other AI-generated faces.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat surprised us was how quickly people improved in less than an hour of training, AI face detection accuracy increased by nearly 30 per cent, and participants not only became more accurate, they became faster too,\u201d added Tanaka in the release. \u201cOur results show that AI detection can be trained up like other forms of perceptual expertise.\u201d<\/p>\n
The researchers said AI image-generation technology is improving extremely quickly, and many people underestimate how convincing these faces can be, so the hope is this work can help people navigate increasingly complex online environments.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"UVic researchers looking to help people spot deepfake AI images Published 1:45 am Tuesday, June 30, 2026 A…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":773091,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[194299],"tags":[49,48,87674],"class_list":["post-773090","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-surrey","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-surrey"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/773090","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=773090"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/773090\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/773091"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=773090"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=773090"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=773090"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}