One of these people is real and the other is AI – but which is which?

Click on the faces throughout this piece that you think are real 

The two images don’t look exactly alike, but there are some uncanny similarities around the eyes, nose and mouth. There I am, on the right: a photograph of me taken recently in a studio in Brixton, south London. I perch in front of a green background, my shirt slightly creased. And there I am again, on the left. 

Except that person isn’t really me. 

It is an odd facsimile in a white T-shirt. She has preternaturally smooth skin, no imperfections, and long, glossy hair. This portrait was generated by artificial intelligence (AI), using just three data points from my face and a brief, eight-word prompt: ‘Woman in her 20s of white British descent.’

My real and bot-generated portraits are the work of the London-based photographer Amit Lennon, who has created a similar set of images for his latest project, Artificial Intelligence Portrayal. I doubt many people seeing it in isolation would be able to tell that my AI portrait isn’t real – which, Lennon explains, is exactly the point. 

The motivation for the project was to ‘see behind the curtain of AI’, he explains. ‘The goal is to make people question what they are looking at and what ingredients went into “making the cake”. I want them to concentrate less on the mechanics of how the work was made and more on the result, how it makes you feel.’