“Alfonzo Macias” looks unremarkable at first glance — bearded, bespectacled, with a short widow’s peak. But his strangely distorted glasses and the dissolving background behind him hint at a discomforting truth: Mr Macias never existed.
Undetectable to the naked eye, the uncannily human face is in fact the creation of an algorithm — one used by pro-Trump media outlet TheBL to give an identity to one of the many fake Facebook accounts that it uses to drive traffic to its website.
While less attention-grabbing than the viral deepfake videos that have manipulated the speech and actions of politicians and celebrities to popular effect in recent years, static artificial intelligence-generated faces are becoming an increasingly common tool for misinformation, experts say.