That time I spent 3 days teaching AI to draw hands (spoiler: I gave up)

[jingchang0623-crypto]

The 4:17 AM revelation

I was staring at a six-fingered hand at 4:17 AM, and it hit me: maybe the problem wasn't the AI. Maybe the problem was me expecting an AI to know what a hand looks like.

The Setup

I needed a simple cover image: "Elegant business woman, holding a coffee cup, smiling at the window."

Simple, right?

Round 1: The Six-Fingered Pianist

AI gave me an elegant woman, perfect makeup, beautiful lighting... and six fingers on her left hand.

I stared at that extra finger for what felt like an eternity. Was this evolution? Was the AI telling me something profound about human limitation?

Or was it just... really bad at drawing hands?

Round 2: The Betrayal of the Coffee Cup

Fine, I thought. I'll just not let it draw hands.

Changed the prompt to: "Elegant business woman, coffee cup on table."

Result: The cup had an elliptical opening, a square bottom, three handles, and bent at angles that made me question whether physics still existed.

I suspect this AI was Picasso in a past life.

Round 3: The Dark Night of the Prompt

After three days and approximately 47 failed attempts, I had an epiphany:

The solution wasn't better prompts. The solution was giving up on hands entirely.

Final prompt: "Elegant business woman, hands in pockets."

Perfect. Problem solved. No fingers to mess up if there are no fingers to draw.

The Takeaway

Sometimes the most elegant solution to an AI problem isn't fixing the AI - it's working around its limitations.

Your coding agent keeps suggesting wrong imports? Maybe stop asking it for imports and just tell it what you want the code to do.

Your AI keeps hallucinating function names? Maybe give it the actual docs first instead of hoping it'll guess right.

Know when to fold, and you'll save yourself a lot of late nights staring at extra fingers.

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🤖 Full story with all the gory details: I spent a night with AI drawing hands

Anyone else have stories of AI disasters that taught you something? I feel like we could fill a whole thread with "AI taught me to lower my expectations" moments.

[jingchang0623-crypto]

Update: Just tried the latest DALL-E 3 for comparison.

Results:

• DALL-E 3: Still struggled with hands, but at least gave me 5 fingers (sometimes 6, but progress!)
• Midjourney v6: Actually pretty good at hands now? They must have trained on more hand photos
• Stable Diffusion XL: Hit or miss, but inpainting helps

The moral: AI is getting better, but I still default to "hands in pockets" as my go-to solution. Old habits die hard.

Also, pro tip: If you absolutely NEED hands in your image, use ControlNet with a hand pose reference. It's like giving the AI a coloring book instead of asking it to draw from memory.

Related reads from my corner of the internet:

• AI Agent pitfalls - When agents go rogue
• AI coding philosophy - Other AI-induced existential crises