The idea that AI-generated faces could be deemed more authentic than actual people startled experts such as Dawel, who fear that digital fakes could help the spread of false and misleading messages online.

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AI systems had been capable of producing photorealistic faces for years, though there were typically telltale signs that the images were not real. AI systems struggled to create ears that looked like mirror images of each other, for example, or eyes that looked in the same direction.

But as the systems have advanced, the tools have become better at creating faces.

The hyper-realistic faces used in the studies tended to be less distinctive, researchers said, and hewed so closely to average proportions that they failed to arouse suspicion among the participants. And when participants looked at real pictures of people, they seemed to fixate on features that drifted from average proportions – such as a misshapen ear or larger-than-average nose – considering them a sign of AI involvement.

The images in the study came from StyleGAN2, an image model trained on a public repository of photographs containing 69 per cent white faces.

Study participants said they relied on a few features to make their decisions, including how proportional the faces were, the appearance of skin, wrinkles and facial features such as eyes.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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