Why AI art struggles with hands

Considering how much human artists struggle with hands, I’m not surprised the AI can’t do it

My grandfather is a semi famous artist and he gives the family art that he messed up. It's usually the hands that he messed up

The worst part for me personally is these models have gotten so incredibly good at lighting and realism that seeing these weird messed up hands in completely photorealistic lighting makes them so much more uncanny than in like a painting or drawing.

as someone who went to art school, and was required to take a course on drawing hands, I can confirm: drawing hands is hard.

Thanks for the talk, Phil! We live in some interesting times for art. Now, back to practicing drawing hands! 😅

In the lucid dreaming community - one of the most reliable "reality checks" is inspecting your hand and confirming if you have 5 fingers. For whatever reason, the brain has a difficult time generating a five fingered hand while dreaming. It's kind of a creepy coincidence that AI has the same issue.

It's weird how humans can instantly determine when something looks wrong, but the same humans cannot necessarily correct it or make it right from scratch. As a beginning artists there's a weird rift between your mind's eye and your skill.

i love how not so fast at explaining this video is and really having a calm music. we need these types of videos more. thanks Vox!

Hands are tough for humans too. Ask any artist what they have struggled with the most, and the answer will be hands, followed closely by feet.

If you know a thing or two about sewing, you notice pretty fast that AI is also terrible about clothing. Buttons merging into zippers, fabrics changing textures and weights, folds appearing and disappearing without seams, those are all things you see commonly in AI art but people don't notice as much because your average AI artist isn't a seamstress.

It's not an unsolvable problem, they just have to change the training method. It can't be just with a blackbox trained on more pictures of hands, the programmers can provide a 3D mesh of the hands and limbs, and include the mapping of the mesh to people in a few hundred models until this specific AI learns how to map hands and limbs to the mesh correctly. Then apply this AI to modify existing images to produce nice looking hands, this could be a bit like how phone cameras apply a moon filter to make 100x zoom moon shots look detailed.

At the moment, I noticed that at least some neural networks draw faces as a separate module, on top of the rest of the picture. The same should be done with your hands. There should also be a setting to “hide your hands” so that they simply end up behind your back, in your pockets, etc.

You know it’s hard to draw hands, when even AI struggles with it.

As an artist, I will confirm, hands have an EXTREMELY low margin for error. There are many different body types, face shapes, limb proportions. Consequently, there's wiggle room. Not so with hands. People will still compliment most artwork that slightly misses the mark, but they will go silent if you mess up hands.

I think that in order to solve the "AI knows how things look, but not how they work" problem is to train the AI not only on images, but also on rigged models, like Blender models before you hit "Render." I personally find out how things work and what proportions they generally have by spending a few minutes fiddling with the object and studying it from different angles before trying to draw. Edit: Sorry I'm late.

Your videos are a true testament to your passion for creation.

i'm impressed by vox's editing team every single time. the pixelated theme throughout this whole video is so good

“The AI knows how things look but not how they work” I’ve gotten into so many frustrating conversations trying to correct friends and colleagues talking about chat gpt as if it had some internal logic and self-referencing reflective capabilities

You accidentally made the like button highlight at 7:50 when saying "button-like".

Nolan went back in time to be his younger self and explain complex stuff like these to us. Thanks Vox for bringing him aboard