Spotting an AI-generated picture of a person used to be relatively easy, if you knew what to look for, says the man who helped create the lifelike images of Australia’s most influential people for our AFR Magazine Power Issue.

Rodolfo Ocampo is an artist and PhD candidate at the University of NSW. His thesis is about the way in which humans and artificial intelligence “collaborate”. His choice of terminology may seem incongruous when applied to machines, but, he says, AI uses feedback loops to change what it delivers, which makes the outcome unknown. That’s the difference between a tool and AI, he says. With a tool, you know what it’s going to do.