From NPR
That smiling LinkedIn profile face might be a computer-generated fake
By Shannon Bond
At first glance, Renée DiResta thought the LinkedIn message seemed normal enough...
By using fake profiles, companies can cast a wide net online without beefing up their own sales staff or hitting LinkedIn's limits on messages. Demand for online sales leads exploded during the pandemic as it became hard for sales teams to pitch their products in person...
"If you ask the average person on the internet, 'Is this a real person or synthetically generated?' they are essentially at chance," said Hany Farid, an expert in digital media forensics at the University of California, Berkeley, who co-authored the study with Sophie J. Nightingale of Lancaster University.
Their study also found people consider computer-made faces slightly more trustworthy than real ones. Farid suspects that's because the AI sticks to the most average features when creating a face.
Hany Farid is a professor of information and electrical engineering & computer sciences at UC Berkeley.
