The Minions made fun of terrible AI images in a Super Bowl ad last night for the upcoming movie Despicable Me 4.
Narrated by actor John Hamm, the ad initially starts off with a serious tone as the Mad Man actor says, “Artificial intelligence is changing the way we see the world, showing us what we never thought possible.”
After showing a picture of Steve Carell and Will Ferrell as nobility, the next picture is of two women practicing yoga except one has three legs and their limbs are grossly entangled with each other.
The next shot is the classic AI image pitfall — a disjointed handshake that has far too many fingers and digits.
After a bizarre shot of people unconvincingly eating spaghetti and another one of a man and a woman riding on sausage dogs, a little Minion giggle can be heard.
As Hamm says, “With artificial intelligence, the future is in good hands”, That’s when it’s revealed that an office full of Minions who are having great fun making terrible AI pictures.
Bad AI
Images generated by artificial intelligence are plagued with coherency images; a reputation the technology can’t seem to shrug despite companies like OpenAI and Midjourney advancing their text-to-image models to increasingly impressive levels.
A common bugbear is hands: AI image models cannot seem to put the right amount of fingers on a hand and put them in the right place — something the Minions made fun on. This is because of the training data: simply put, the AI machines were trained on more pictures of people’s faces than people’s hands so there is a deficiency.
The 2D image generators also struggle to conceptualize the 3D geometry of a hand, that’s according to Professor Peter Bentley, a computer scientist and author based at the University College London.
“They’ve got the hang of the general idea of a hand. It has a palm, fingers, and nails but none of these models actually understand what the full thing is,” he said.
Last month Donald Trump shared an AI image of himself on his social media platform Truth Social praying with six fingers on each hand.