The next time you receive a message on a social media site such as LinkedIn from someone promoting a product or service, take a close look at the sender’s profile picture. Is there anything odd about it?
A missing earring, teeth off-centre, or their eyes bang in the middle of the image?
The face you are looking at may not belong to a real human but could be a type of “deepfake”, one of thousands of profile pictures across social media generated by artificial intelligence to act as robotic salesmen and women.
Researchers at the Stanford Internet Observatory identified more than 1,000 such accounts on LinkedIn, the social media site for professional networking.
These faces do not belong to any real person, living or dead.
