Twitter is in stitches over this hilarious AI art fail

AI art has become hugely impressive – sometimes. The latest generation of AI art generators can conjure up experimental images in all kinds of styles much more quickly than a human artist could illustrate them. The results have become so convincing that there are concerns for the future of artists' jobs, but examples like this bring things back to Earth and show how unreliable the tools can be. 

Since AI art generators don't actually understand what they're creating, they can come up with some very strange images – confusing a hand for a foot, for example. The example below is causing much hilarity over on Twitter, but we're wondering if we might start seeing this kind of anatomic anomaly cropping up everywhere (if you need to catch up on how text-to-image generators work, see our piece on how to use DALL-E 2).

The webcomic artist Whyenn shared the above AI art fail on Twitter, saying that he "loves AI art but only when it fails spectacularly". He doesn't mention where the image was from or which AI art generator was used to make it, but it shows two female characters sitting on a beach holding hands... or rather holding hand and foot.

The image has provoked much mirth. One person replied: "A true masterpiece... The future of art, beyond human ability and comprehension. THIS is the fundamental truth of art, which only AI can bring to the table." "Let's forget the weird hand-leg thing for the moment. Did anyone speak about the fact that her actual hand looks like a foot!?" someone else asked.

This is far from the first time we've seen AI art deliver some strange takes on the human anatomy. In fact, there's a whole Discord channel dedicated to Stable Diffusion fails. You would hope that this kind of thing doesn't make it to final use in any real project, but then again, thinking about the number of terrible Photoshop fails we've seen make it to magazine pages, posters and even billboard ads over the years, we're not ruling it out. If companies do start to use AI art tools for marketing, we could start to see some very strange campaigns.

Read more:

• The best AI art generators compared
• DALL-E 2 access is now open to everyone, and that's kind of terrifying
• The first copyrighted AI art looks uncannily like Zendaya