Artifical Intelligence's Weird Hands Problem
It feels like AI has advanced more in the last year or so than it did in the previous forty-seven years that I have been alive. For me, AI is like virtual reality: we were told it was going to make a massive impact and change the world forever. Then, AI and virtual reality stubbornly refused to make a seismic impact or change the world forever.
That has changed in the past year or so. AI has evolved by leaps and bounds. It suddenly seemed to be everywhere. This massive leap forward in sophistication and usefulness received a warm welcome.
People were dazzled by all that AI could do with just a prompt. We were far too impressed by AI’s Stupid Robot Tricks. Ever wondered what it would look like if Tony Soprano was Shrek? AI had you covered.
People were initially impressed by AI’s advancement. There was a honeymoon period during which we half-forgot all of the apocalyptic ramifications of gradually ceding more and more power to robots.
Then came the backlash. After discovering all that AI was now capable of, we became cognizant of its many limitations as well.
True, AI could create images in seconds with a single, simple prompt, but those images tended to be garish, tacky, and artless.
The more we learn about AI, the uglier and more problematic it becomes, in no small part because all those AI engines are trained on actual writing by bona fide human beings like myself.
I have no doubt that all of the articles I wrote for The A.V. Club and The Dissolve have been used to “teach” robots to write like people. That puts me in the unenviable position of having to compete, on a weird, existential level, with my younger, more successful self.
AI wasn’t just making dumb pictures for our amusement; it was coming for our jobs. If it did, in fact, end up changing society in a profound way, there is no reason to believe that its impact will be wholly, or even primarily, positive.
AI can make tacky pictures in seconds. It can create articles just as easily and quickly and, not coincidentally, just as glibly.
It did not take me long to recognize the hallmarks of writing that was done by AI rather than human beings. For example, I’ve recently become fascinated by the existence of Facebook-centric “satire” sites designed to troll Trump supporters and geriatric Conservatives.
I’m talking about groups like Spacex Fanclub, an ostensible “satire” site whose articles are all clearly the product of AI. Though the site professes to be satirical, it does not contain satire and is largely devoid of jokes.
The articles are almost poignantly earnest and hopelessly bland. They aren’t completely incoherent, but that’s about the best that can be said of them.
Artificial intelligence is in its Uncanny Valley phase. Like early computer animation, it comes close enough to seeming genuinely human and real to be creepy as fuck.
It’s generally pretty easy to discern whether something was created by a human being or Artificial Intelligence, although senior citizens, who tend to be the least tech-savvy people alive, are consistently fooled by this weird wave.
Just as early computer animation was incapable of rendering human beings in a way that wasn't viscerally disturbing and moderately horrifying, AI has a serious problem with hands.
I have no idea why, but human hands are one of AI’s many weaknesses. So, if you wonder whether an image is AI-generated, look at the hands. If there are eight fingers on one hand and the other is all thumbs, then you’re looking at something that was not created by human beings.
AI is, fundamentally, an ugly and anti-human endeavor. Its hideousness is laid bare in its weird inability to make hands look like hands. Will AI ever figure hands out? Probably. That will be a positive development in that we’ll all be subjected to less disturbing images, but a less positive development because it means that AI will have gotten considerably better at imitating people, and it’s a matter of time, then, until we’re in a full-on Skynet/The Terminator situation where we will be in an all-out war with robots we were dumb enough to empower.
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