Artificial intelligence has become remarkably good at creating fake human faces. So good, in fact, that the old tricks people relied on – counting fingers, spotting warped earrings, or looking for distorted backgrounds – are quickly becoming obsolete. According to a new study highlighted by the BBC, the next line of defence may not be a better AI detector at all. It might simply be a better-trained human.

Researchers from the University of Aberdeen, working alongside Australia’s National University, found that people can dramatically improve their ability to distinguish AI-generated faces from real ones after a relatively short period of structured training. Instead of hunting for obvious visual glitches, participants were taught to recognise subtle patterns that modern image generators still struggle to replicate consistently.

The AI race is forcing humans to evolve too

For years, identifying AI-generated images felt almost trivial. Early models often produced six fingers, mismatched earrings or impossible shadows. But today’s generators, powered by systems such as StyleGAN3 and newer diffusion models, have largely moved beyond those tell-tale mistakes. As a result, researchers argue that relying on visual defects is no longer an effective strategy.

Instead, participants were trained to judge six perceptual qualities that AI faces often share. These include unusually perfect facial symmetry, highly proportional features, above-average attractiveness, generic-looking facial structures, limited emotional expression, and faces that are surprisingly difficult to remember after you’ve looked away.

The results were striking. Before training, participants correctly identified AI-generated faces only around 40 percent of the time. After roughly an hour of guided learning and repeated exposure to both real and synthetic faces, accuracy climbed to nearly 80 percent. A handful of participants even approached perfect detection scores. More importantly, their confidence became better aligned with their actual performance, something earlier research suggested was often missing.

Why spotting AI faces matters more than ever

This isn’t simply an academic exercise anymore. Deepfake technology is already being used in financial fraud, political influence campaigns and online identity scams. The BBC points to Deloitte estimates suggesting losses from AI-enabled deepfake fraud in the United States could rise to £40 billion next year, up sharply from around £12 billion in 2023. It also references a widely reported Hong Kong case in which scammers allegedly used a deepfake video call to convince an employee to transfer £25 million. Meanwhile, an earlier Associated Press investigation uncovered an AI-generated LinkedIn profile that successfully infiltrated US policy circles.

The study also highlights another important issue: AI systems remain less reliable at generating older faces, younger faces and people from underrepresented ethnic groups because of biases in their training data. Those imperfections may still provide useful clues for human observers.

Perhaps the most interesting takeaway is that the human brain appears to learn much like AI itself. By repeatedly seeing examples of real and fake faces, people gradually develop an intuitive sense of authenticity rather than relying on a single giveaway. Researchers believe that instinct may become one of our strongest tools as generative AI continues to improve.

The irony is difficult to ignore. As artificial intelligence becomes better at pretending to be human, humans may have to start training themselves the way machines do – through data, repetition, and pattern recognition. AI detectors may keep improving, but the research suggests they shouldn’t be the only defence. Human judgement still has a role to play; it just needs an upgrade.