In the age of the internet and social networks, it is not difficult to come across contacts who use fake profile images. Some use photos of real people, while others prefer artificial images with various artificial intelligence systems .
In both cases, however, it is possible to understand if a profile photo is authentic or not. Let’s take the case and example that a subject has inserted a photo that is not of her in his profile picture. To understand if it’s really him, we can try to upload the image link or the photo file to Google Lens . This operation is very simple and you can test it on both desktop and mobile by following these steps:
- Go to Google and in the search bar, click on the camera icon (it’s actually the Google Lens logo).
- Choose the ” Upload a file” option to upload a photo that you have in memory or paste the image link in the box below. Proceed by clicking on ” Search “.
After a few seconds, the site should respond to you with a series of photos similar to the one you uploaded, including links to Internet sites that contain an exact copy of it: should you see any results that are interesting to you, you simply have to go and visit the page proposal to find out more details about the photo in question.
If the profile picture belongs to a famous person, you’ll know right away.
How to find out if the profile picture is modified with AI systems
To find out if an account or any other image has been retouched with artificial intelligence editors, you can use the Fake Profile Detector tool . It’s a browser extension that’s easy to use, as you just need to download it.
Once downloaded, you can start using the tool developed by the company V7Labs , which deals precisely with artificial intelligence.
However, it should be remembered that this only applies to images in which people’s faces appear and not abstract or other types of images.
How to use V7 Deepfake Detector
- Open Chrome Browser Visit this pageand click on Add > Add to Chrome .
- Choose the profile picture you want to analyze and right click on it.
- Select the “ Check fake profile picture” option and wait for the result that will be shown to you in the notification at the top right.
In this case, the notification tells me that “it looks like a real person” as “there are no faces created with artificial intelligence” . In fact, in the example I had chosen a photo of another footballer, namely Bernardeschi.
IMPORTANT
- Currently Fake Profile only works on Desktop
- This chrome extension uses notifications to produce AI model results, so make sure you have them turned on and don’t disturb mode when using it.
- If you’re using a Mac, the results are often found in action center, accessed by swiping from the right edge of the trackpad to the left with two fingers.
- This AI model only works with StyleGAN images, which are used to generate fake human faces of people who don’t really exist. It does not detect deepfake videos or face swaps.
- It does not currently work with deep fakes in videos or face swaps.
