In the early days of AI image generators, the supposedly incorrect representation of the hand served as an identifier of a generated image.
Art historian and author Prof. Amanda Wasielewski, in her essay “Midjourney Can’t Count”, defined the phenomenon, which was widely discussed in internet forums, as the “hands problem”. Popular image generators like DALL-E and MIDJOURNEY are currently doing everything they can to correct the error by specifying that a hand must always have five fingers. Our standard thinking is implanted into the machine, which leads us to question what the bigger mistake is - the original error, or the attempt to fix it.
The artifacts, cast in concrete, capture a stage of naive freedom of a growing “intelligence” as a fossil of rapidly developing technology.
Installation view at Art Cologne 2023, Photo: Doerthe Boxberg
Installation view at Art Cologne 2023, Photo: Doerthe Boxberg