AI Creates Perfect Photos Of Parties That Never Happened, But For A Few Unsettling Details

It looks impressive, and then you look closer and want to kill it with fire.

Images generated by artificial intelligence (AI) have come a long way in recent years. In 2014, for instance, a top-of-the-range industry-leading AI could just about produce an image that looked like it was taken on a Game Boy color. Now it's possible to type in a few words, and less than a few minutes later see Darth Maul getting hitched, or a kickass baby doing a solo skydive.

Star Wars characters getting married

Skydiving Baby

However, there are still a number of issues that keep cropping up – even if you ignore the demons Loab and Crungus that keep invading AI art uninvited. On Friday, one Midjourney enthusiast shared images that the AI had created of parties, none of which had taken place.

As well as a number of biases that Twitter user Miles encountered – including getting the AI to show "people who aren't white as mayonnaise" when asking it to depict "people" – Twitter users noticed some other details in the images which would make you believe in demons if the photos were verified to be real.

To cut a long story short, the AI produces nightmare fuel whenever it is asked to do teeth or hands.

At first glance, the photos may look quite like a party – but the moment you start counting fingers or teeth it all falls apart. By and large, people were not impressed by the overall effect.

"Thinking about going with an acquaintance to a cramped house party," illustrator Trevor Henderson wrote. "As the night goes on you notice people in the crowd grinning at you with mouths that hold too many teeth, hands grip your shoulders possessively, squirming with far too many fingers. You're the guest of honor."

AI, like anyone taking a high school art class, struggles with hands. 

"Due to the complex geometry of hands, there is no standard set of lines or shapes that AI can recognize as a hand," one designer and AI expert explained. "In order to generate realistic hands, AI needs to collate multiple different shapes and arrangements. There are about 30 points of geometric divergences in the human hand, from finger length and width to the metacarpals and wrist joints."

The AI works on pattern recognition and producing patterns, rather than possessing the concept of hands themselves. 

It may think it has nailed the pattern, the same with teeth, by putting an indeterminate amount of fingers clumped around a palm, but a quick glance by someone who has the concept of hands nailed (humans win again) and you are in uncanny valley territory.

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