Can people tell AI headshots from a real photographer's?

Photos

Portraits of people who gave consent for this public test. Each person was photographed by a professional photographer, and AI photos of the same people were generated. The image files are served under opaque names with no extension, so the file name gives nothing away.

Rounds

Each round deals up to 12 photos at random from the set, in random order. Rounds are not balanced between AI and photographer photos, so one round can hold more of either. Before each guess, players answer the platform question: how much they would trust the person (1–5).

Sample

Anyone can play; players are self-selected visitors, not a representative panel. Age band, gender and country are optional and self-reported. A player is a round with at least one counted answer.

Exclusions

Answers given in under 300 ms are treated as likely bots and left out. Developer test rounds are left out. A player can answer each photo in a round once; repeat answers don't change the first one. The score distribution only uses finished rounds.

Uncertainty

The 95% interval is a Wilson score interval over all counted answers. It treats answers as independent, but answers are grouped by player, so the true uncertainty is somewhat wider. The dated snapshot will use a player-clustered bootstrap interval.

Privacy and interest

No IP address is stored, only a hash of the browser's user agent and the country reported by our CDN. Narkis sells AI photos and so has an interest in the result; the method and the uncertainty are published for that reason.

The aggregated results are published under CC BY 4.0 by the Photo Intelligence Lab by Narkis. Snapshot: published when the study passes 1,000 counted answers.