Behavioral and neural evidence for the underestimated attractiveness of faces synthesized using an artificial neural network

Despite recent advantages in artificial intelligence (AI), the potential human aversion to AI has not been dispelled yet. If such aversion degrades the human preference to AI-synthesized visual information, the preference should be reduced solely by the human belief that the information is synthesized by AI, independently of its appearance. To test this hypothesis, this study designed a task paradigm in which naive participants rated the attractiveness of various faces synthesized using an artificial neural network, under the fake instruction that half of the faces were synthetic and the other half were real. This design allowed evaluating the effect of participants beliefs on their attractiveness ratings separately from the effect of facial appearance. In addition, to investigate the neural substrates of the belief effect, brain responses to faces were collected using fMRI during this task. It is found that participants ratings declined when the faces were believed to be synthetic. Furthermore, the belief changed the responsiveness of fMRI signals to facial attractiveness in the right fusiform cortex. These behavioral and neural findings support the notion that the human preference to visual information becomes lower solely due to the beliefs that the information is synthesized by AI.