When it comes to generating realistic, fake photos of people, specifically people’s faces, AI image generators can be very hit and miss but they are getting better by the week, literally. I will collect photos generated by the different AI Art generators and post them here for comparison.
MidJourney
These AI generated faces were all created with Midjourney’s beta algorithm launched on August 30th 2022. Beta algorithms change frequently, so expect it to change by the time you even see this.
Notice the attempt to put a signature watermark at the bottom of the photo. This is common to many AI image generators as they have been ‘trained’ on images with either website urls, logos or other watermarks and they try to emulate them.
A lot AI faces seem to have a large amount of freckles or dark spots. At first glance, this makes them appear genuine, especially as we are not used to seeing them on overly airbrushed models found everywhere from advertising to fashion photography, so when we see uneven skin it can make them seem ultra-genuine, the opposite of a smooth computer generated face which is what we would expect from a fake human face, but after you see a lot of AI faces, it can become a tell tale sign of a fake face.
Especially when the AI gets carried away.
A very striking image, but hardly a representation of what a human face usually looks like.
The AI generated faces from MidJourney’s new ‘realistic’ algorithm are phenomenal overall and they are larger, crisper and more high resolution than most of the other face generation tools out there and not all the faces are so generously freckled or spotted.
MidJourney did a pretty good job of generating a variety of ages and ethnicities though when I asked for nationalities I often had to specify a profession to avoid the AI putting the people in sometimes cliched national garb.
The expressions were quite unique and often had emotional qualities you’d expect to find only in professional portrait photography.
The ai face generator will even attempt to do famous people if you ask for them, here’s a fake photo of Joe Strummer from The Clash.
It’s a pretty good likeness, despite the overly thick rim on his bottom eyelids.
here’s a link to a photo (by wwwhatsup on Wikipedia) of the real Joe Strummer in case you don’t know what he looks like.
The images here have been hand picked from about 30 images and many, perhaps half of them or more, did not turn out so well.
The problem is almost always in the eyes, unfortunately the most important feature of all.
Here are a few of those
Sometimes it went a bit crazy, probably because I used the word “Portrait” in my text prompt and the AI was trying to emulate more artistic portrait photography it has in its database.
Is that a flaw? Probably more of a feature really.
Next I will dive into face generating with Dall-E 2 but before I go, I will answer the burning question. Yes, it can do AI pet portraits too!
Next Up: Generating Realistic Faces With Dall-E
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