Here’s why AI is so bad at creating images of human hands

Those hands are really creepy.

lettuce hands

Cutting-edge AI-powered image generators are really powerful. You can create believable images of virtually anything you can imagine – all from a simple text input.

But they are not 100 percent perfect and have a particular weakness when it comes to rendering human hands, such as BuzzFeed News Reportedly a common problem that even the most powerful AIs like Midjourney seriously struggle with. Why? It’s complicated.

nightmare fuel

AI attempts to render human hands have often resulted in nightmares. Take Midjourney, the tool that brought you some near-photorealistic yet spooky images of a house party last month.

The pictures, generated by developer Miles Zimmerman, might look like they were taken decades ago by a party-goer with a point-and-shoot camera. But when it comes to her hands, Midjourney’s attempts really start to fail.

From hands with way too many fingers to levitating fingers that seem destined to levitate in empty space on their own, hands are the only dead and illusion-busting giveaway.

anatomy of the hand

But why is it struggling so much with its hands? Several factors can play a role.

“It’s well known that human images in AI datasets make hands less visible than faces,” said a representative from Stability AI, the company behind the Stable Diffusion image generator BuzzFeed News. “Hands also tend to be much smaller in the source images as they are relatively rarely visible in large form.”

Simply put, these AIs just don’t know what hands are or how they relate to the human body.

“It’s all about how hands are represented in the data sets,” University of Florida AI expert Amelia Winger-Bearskin told the publication. “Hands in pictures are quite nuanced. They usually hold onto something. Or sometimes they hold on to another person.”

In short, AIs like Midjourney still haven’t understood all the complex shapes that hands can take.

For that to change, AIs need to understand “the anatomical reality of being human,” as Winger-Bearskin put it BuzzFeed Newssomething that could happen much sooner than you might think.

CONTINUE READING: Why are AI-generated hands so messed up? Why are AI-generated hands so messed up? [BuzzFeed News]

More on broken hands: We are mesmerized by these AI-generated party images

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