AI-Generated Faces Could Be Making Real People Less Employable

You don’t really need scientists to know that personal attractiveness opens doors, since you’ve likely been the victim or the beneficiary of this to some extent in your life; nor to discover that AI-generated faces tend to be more attractive than real people (for a variety of reasons, many involving human-made preferences and processes).

Nonetheless, a related, new academic collaboration from the US caught my eye today, citing evidence that AI-generated beauty may be costing real people job interviews. In a study involving 570 people, those previously exposed to unusually attractive AI-generated faces subsequently judged real job applicants as less employable and less trustworthy; and their willingness to offer interviews fell from 77.4% to 72.5%, even though they were assessing exactly the same applicants.

The researchers also investigated how attractive AI-generated faces appear compared to real ones, using images produced by diverse commercial and open-weight models. Asking 550 people to rate photographs of real people alongside AI-generated faces, it was found that the synthetic faces consistently received higher scores; and in an additional comparison, apposite metrics found that 37% of…