AI Image Generators Keep Messing Up Hands. Here's Why.

Earlier this month, Miles Zimmerman, a 31-year-old programmer from San Francisco, was messing around with Midjourney, the AI-powered tool that generates images with a simple text prompt, and having his mind blown. One of his prompts, which he created with the help of ChatGPT, was extremely detailed: "A candid photo of some happy 20-something year-olds in 2018 dressed up for a night out, enjoying themselves mid-dance at a house party in some apartment in the city, photographed by Nan Goldin, taken with a Fujifilm Instax Mini 9, flash, candid, natural, spontaneous, youthful, lively, carefree, -- ar 3:2." At first, Zimmerman was astonished at the level of detail. Faces, skin, hair, and clothes looked photorealistic -- although slightly plastic, as later pointed out by some observers -- and the expressions were exactly what he had asked for. But the closer he looked, the weirder the pictures seemed.