{"id":4957,"date":"2023-04-28T10:46:29","date_gmt":"2023-04-28T17:46:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=4957"},"modified":"2023-04-30T13:44:25","modified_gmt":"2023-04-30T20:44:25","slug":"feet-have-no-excuse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=4957","title":{"rendered":"Feet Have No Excuse"},"content":{"rendered":"

(If you haven\u2019t read my entry for April 23<\/a> yet, please do so\u2014this entry is a follow-on, now that I\u2019ve had a chance to do a little more research.)<\/p>\n

\n

AI image generators can\u2019t draw hands worth a rat\u2019s heiny. That\u2019s the lesson I took away from my efforts some days ago, trying to see if any of the AI imagers could create an ebook cover image for my latest novelette, \u201cVolare!\u201d It wasn\u2019t just me, and it wasn\u2019t just the two image generators I tried. If you duckduck around the Web you\u2019ll find a great many essays asking \u201cWhy can\u2019t AIs draw hands and feet?\u201d and then fail to answer the question. <\/p>\n

The standard answer (and it\u2019s one I can certainly accept, with reservations) is that human hands are very complicated machines with a lot of moving parts and a great many possible positions. I would argue that an infinite variety of positions is what hands are for<\/em>\u2014and are in fact the reason that we created a high-tech civilization. Even artists have trouble drawing hands, and to a lesser extent, feet. This is a good long-form tutorial on how to draw hands and feet<\/a>. Not an easy business, even for us.<\/p>\n

In photographs and drawn\/painted art, hands are almost always doing things, not just resting in someone\u2019s lap. And in doing things, they express all those countless positions that they take in ordinary and imaginary life. So if AIs are trained by showing them pictures of people and their hands, some of those pictures will show parts of hands occluded by things like beer steins and umbrella handles, or\u2014this must be a gnarly challenge\u2014someone else\u2019s hands. In some pictures, it may look like hands have four fingers, or perhaps three. Fingers can be splayed or together and clenched against their palm. AIs are pattern matchers, and with hands and especially fingers, there are a huge<\/em> number of patterns.<\/p>\n

So faced with too many patterns, the AI \u201cguesses,\u201d and draws something that violates one or more traits of all hands.<\/p>\n

The most serious flaw in this reasoning comes from elsewhere in the body: feet. In the fifty-odd images the AIs created of a barefoot woman sitting in a basket, deformed feet were almost as common as deformed hands. This is a lot harder to figure, for this reason: feet have nowhere near<\/em> the number of possible positions that hands have. About the most extreme position a foot can have is curled toes. Most of the time, feet are flat on the floor, and that\u2019s all the expressive power they have. This suggests that AIs should have no particular trouble with feet.<\/p>\n

But they do.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ll grant that in most photos and art, feet are in shoes, while hands generally go naked except in bad weather or messy\/hazardous work. So there are fewer images of feet to train an AI. I had an AI gin up some images this morning from the following description: \u201cA woman sitting in a wicker basket in a nightgown, wearing ballet slippers.\u201d I did five or six, and the best one is below:<\/p>\n

\"Woman<\/a><\/p>\n

Her left leg seems smaller than her right, which is a different but related problem with AI images. And her hands this time, remarkably, are less grotesque than her arms. But add some ballet slippers, and the foot problem goes away. The explanation should be obvious: In a ballet slipper, all feet look more or less alike. The same is likely the case for feet in Doc Martin boots or high-top sneakers. (I may or may not ask an AI for an image of a woman in sandals, because I think I already know what I\u2019d get.)<\/p>\n

There were other issues with the images I got back from the two AIs I messed with, especially in faces. Even in the relatively good image above, her face seems a little off. This may be because we humans are very good at analyzing faces. Hands and feet, not so much. Defects there have to be more serious to be obvious.<\/p>\n

Anyway. The real problem with AI image generation is that they are piecing together bits of images that they\u2019ve digested as part of their training. They are not<\/em> creating a wire-frame outline of a human body in a given position and then fleshing it out. At best they\u2019re averaging thousands or millions of images of hands (or whatever) and smushing them together into an image that broadly resembles a human being.<\/p>\n

Not knowing the nature of the algorithms that AI image generators use, I can\u2019t say whether this is a solvable problem or not. My guess is that it\u2019s not, not the way the software works today. And this is how we can spot deepfakes: Count fingers. The hands don\u2019t lie.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

(If you haven\u2019t read my entry for April 23 yet, please do so\u2014this entry is a follow-on, now that I\u2019ve had a chance to do a little more research.) AI image generators can\u2019t draw hands worth a rat\u2019s heiny. That\u2019s the lesson I took away from my efforts some days ago, trying to see if […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4957","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ideasandanalysis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4957","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4957"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4957\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4970,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4957\/revisions\/4970"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4957"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4957"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4957"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}