About

AI Drawing Hands or AI Drawing Fingers refers to a series of memes and jokes that parody the poor ability of artificial intelligence image generators, such as Midjourney and DALL-E, to generate realistic-looking human hands. The memes typically highlight poor examples of AI-generated imagery and have been employed to criticize the advance of AI art. The concept of AI struggling to create accurate hands became a particularly prominent topic online in early 2023.

Origin

On June 22nd, 2022, Twitter^[1] user @pikcatl posted the earliest viral meme about AIs' poor ability to render realistic-looking human hands. The image, generated with DALL-E Mini, depicted nine failed renders of human hands and gained over 820 retweets and 8,000 likes in seven months (shown below).

Spread

The parody trend saw more presence online following the popularization of more advanced image generative AIs, such as Midjourney and Stable Diffusion, during the summer of 2022. On September 30th, 2022, Twitter^[2] user @ImMisterPlow posted a Can a Robot Write a Symphony? comic about AI drawing hands that gained over 13,400 retweets and 132,700 likes in four months (shown below, left). On October 12th, Twitter^[3] user @Thuminnoo posted a thread of examples of AI-generated images containing failed attempts at generating human hands, with the first post in the thread (shown below, right) gaining over 19,100 retweets and 167,300 likes in a similar timeframe.

The parody trend saw further development in late 2022 as the anti-AI movement gained traction among artists on social media. For example, on November 1st, 2022, Redditor tonofsoul posted a meme that gained over 22,300 upvotes in the /r/dankmemes^[4] subreddit in three months (shown below, left). On December 14th, artist @kouroute tweeted^[5] a "No to AI-generated images" post depicting a hand with seven fingers flipping the bird as a part of the ArtStation Anti-AI protest, with the tweet gaining over 2,700 retweets and 28,700 likes in two months (shown below, right).

More memes about AIs' hands and fingers were posted in 2023, with users often cropping parts of AI-generated images to highlight AIs' failed attempts to render realistic-looking hands.

On January 31st, 2023, BuzzFeed^[6] also published an article on the topic under the title "Why Are AI-Generated Hands So Messed Up?" that explored the reason behind this phenomenon. A response from a Stability AI spokesperson to BuzzFeed answered:

It’s generally understood that within AI datasets, human images display hands less visibly than they do faces. Hands also tend to be much smaller in the source images, as they are relatively rarely visible in large form.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References