Study finds exposure to AI-generated faces lowers interview offers for real applicants

The researchers also audited 27 text‑to‑image generators released between 2022 and 2026, creating 51,300 synthetic faces and comparing them to 160,196 real photographs from multiple public datasets. Human raters (550 adults) consistently judged AI‑generated faces as more attractive; 37% of AI‑generated female faces outscored the median professional fashion model. Automated attractiveness scores from ResNet‑50 and SwinFace models echoed the human ratings, with most generators producing faces above the real‑photo baseline. The authors caution that the findings stem from a controlled experiment and call for further work to determine whether the bias persists in real‑world hiring contexts.