So why does AI have a hard time getting fingers right?

I asked Open AI, "why does AI have a hard time getting fingers right?"

Response:

AI often struggles with generating realistic fingers—especially in images—because human hands are incredibly complex and visually nuanced. Here's a breakdown of the main reasons:

?? 1. Data Ambiguity

AI image generators (like DALL·E or others) are trained on vast amounts of images scraped from the internet, many of which:

Have hands that are blurred, cropped, or in unusual poses

Contain inconsistent annotations or labeling

Include artistic depictions of hands (e.g. cartoonish, stylized, or symbolic), which can confuse the model

This noisy training data makes it hard for the model to "learn" exactly what hands—and specifically fingers—should look like.

?? 2. Lack of Spatial Understanding

AI models generate images by predicting patterns, not by understanding anatomy.

Human fingers have rigid structures, joints, and specific proportions

AI may not truly "know" that humans have five fingers per hand, or that fingers can’t randomly sprout from palms

So it can easily generate:

Extra fingers

Fused or melted fingers

Twisted, anatomically impossible poses

?? 3. Hands Have High Visual Entropy

Hands can take thousands of shapes:

Open or closed

Holding objects

Gesturing or in motion

Seen from different angles, lighting, and occlusion

All this visual variability makes them one of the hardest parts of the body to model accurately.

?? 4. Limitations of Generative Models

Even advanced models work by:

Predicting pixels or patches based on context

Using statistical patterns from training data

They don’t "build" a hand from a skeletal structure—they approximate what a hand should look like based on prior examples.

That’s why even realistic AI images sometimes produce:

6 fingers

Fingers growing out of fingers

Missing thumbs, etc.

?? Side Note: It's Getting Better

With newer models like DALL·E 3, Midjourney v6, and others, hand generation has improved significantly due to:

Better training data

Improved attention mechanisms

Post-processing or correction models

But it’s still not perfect—hands remain one of the toughest "tells" for detecting AI-generated images.

If you're interested, I can show you comparisons of how different AI models handle hands—or even generate a few to illustrate the point.

quote:

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Ironically enough, it’s very common for artists to also have issues drawing hands/fingers correctly.

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This. Human hands for whatever reasons are hella hard for humans to draw as well. It's weird, honestly.

quote:

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Ironically enough, it’s very common for artists to also have issues drawing hands/fingers correctly.

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That Jack Dawson sure could draw some hands and fingers.