AI's art school problem

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Willy Blackmore on the copious number of fingers in the uncanny valley.

At first glance, they look like something you might have seen posted on Last Night’s Party circa 2006: a group of girls in a dimly lit room, faces shining with the pop of a flash. They are skinny, pretty, uniformly white, familiar. But then, the fingers: hot dog-like stubs on one girl’s hand, with just a tiny (and somehow grotesque) hint of too-narrow fingernail. A menorah’s worth of fingers on another, clenching some nonexistent piece of selfie technology that looks straight out of an Apple X Fisher Price collab. They’re not anyone you’ve ever met, because they don’t exist, but rather were pulled out of the neural network that drives the AI art bot Midjourney. 

The party girls are one of the latest examples of the fucked-up-ness of AI hands, which has become both a defining feature and endless joke in this on-the-brink moment of AI cultural production. Go looking for bad AI hands online and it almost feels like there are as many examples as there are of “good” or passable computer creations. A raccoon that looks like it would skitter around like crab on all 19 of its fingers. Hand shakes that nest hands inside hands like Russian dolls.

I will cop to feeding my face into the neural network when the Lensa app went viral in December, and in one of the resulting images, which made me look like I was about to go drill a hole in an asteroid with Bruce Willis, my arm petered out into an almost Cronenberg-like nub of folded-over flesh. If Lensa could map my likeness against so many portraits of superheroes and warlocks and bounty hunters, pumping up my chest but also dramatizing the lines under my tired eyes, why couldn’t it even begin to give me an anatomically correct hand? 

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