Nvidia showed us the possibility of creating faces with artificial intelligence in 2017. A year later, their results grew in quality and quantity, giving rise to truly eerie portraits. Today, fake profiles have taken the Web by storm, and with the support of these algorithm-generated faces, they're becoming increasingly difficult to detect. That's where the Chrome extension called Fake Profile Detector comes to the rescue, allowing us to know if a social profile is fake with just a couple of clicks.
An excellent article published by NPR explains the rise of fake accounts on LinkedIn. Two Stanford researchers ran a brief experiment and, within two weeks, uncovered more than a thousand fake profiles, all sharing a common detail: they used AI-generated faces.
Obviously, this tactic extends far beyond LinkedIn. Creating a fake social profile on the Internet is very simple, and the availability of these artificial faces makes their initial detection more complicated. However, those faces are also a weak point, because they repeat patterns and characteristics that can be identified with the right tools. The extension Fake Profile Detector is one of them.
How to Tell If a Social Profile Is Fake with Fake Profile Detector
The first thing you need to do before using Fake Profile Detector is to confirm that Chrome can display notifications on Windows. The rest is a matter of right-clicking on the face that raises doubts and selecting the option “Check fake profile picture” from the context menu. The extension will show a notification with its results, indicating a percentage of probability or improbability of a fake face.
In general, Fake Profile Detector does no more than confirm our suspicions. AI-generated faces cannot escape certain parameters such as blurry backgrounds, irregular clothing, defects in the necks, symmetrical teeth or teeth fused with the lips, erratic hair, missing accessories (for example, the fake person wears only one earring), and eyes always centered in the image.
However, the creator of the extension warns that while it is useful for knowing whether a social profile is fake, it can do nothing against deep fakes of video or face swaps based on real people. Its priority is to analyze and detect faces based on StyleGAN or other similar technologies, and we must admit that it does a very good job. Download a copy!
Fake Profile Detector: Click here.
