Frontier vision-language models have overtaken young adults at detecting AI-generated portraits -- but not their calibration
AI image generators now create face portraits that are hard to tell from real photographs. Vision-language models (VLMs) are increasingly proposed to flag such images. We benchmarked 19 VLMs on the same 198 face portraits -- real photographs and identity-matched ChatGPT-4o and Imagen 3 versions -- under the same task as our earlier study of 1,667 adults (85% correct overall; accuracy fell steeply with age). The June-2026 cohort of 14 models only matched adults in their 20s-30s. Four weeks later the ceiling broke. Among five July-2026 releases under the identical protocol, gpt-5.6-sol reached 92.8% balanced accuracy (five-draw mean 92.1%), clearly above adults in their 20s (88.5%), and cla...
| Authors | Sunwhi Kim, Sunyul Kim, Meounggun Jo et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.HC |
| Published | 31 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 31 August 2026 |
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