Bathed in church window light, head bowed while kneeling in the pews; Donald Trump looks to be in deep contemplation. The only problem? He has six fingers on each hand.
Trump, who has just won the New Hampshire primary and looks set to be the Republican nominee for president, has shared an AI image of himself praying in a church on his social media platform Truth Social.
The AI image was evidently made by one of the newer text-to-image models as it is a fairly legible recreation of the former president. But once viewers started counting the fingers on Trump’s hand, it quickly became apparent something was wrong.
In the image, Trump has five fingers and a thumb — AI image generators are notoriously bad at hands. This is because of the datasets used to train AI image generators: simply put, there are far more photos in the world of people’s faces than hands so the machines didn’t get as much information on people’s hands as other body parts.
“Hands also tend to be much smaller in the source images, as they are relatively rarely visible in large form,” says Stability AI, the makers of AI image generator Stable Diffusion.
Trump and AI
Trump “ReTruthed” the image (as it is called on Truth Social) that was posted by a user called “Patriot4Life.” It was just one of many, many images and memes that Trump was ReTruthing around the time of the New Hampshire primary vote.
Given the sheer volume of Trump’s Truth Social output, it’s doubtful the ex-president spotted the AI version of him had six fingers. But, judging from the rowdy comment section, it appears everyone knew that the image was AI-generated. With fears swirling around AI images and the presidential election slated for November, the fact that most people appear to be able to tell an AI image is reassuring.
With Trump’s level of fame and the rise of generative AI, it is inevitable that he will be one of the most recreated individuals with the technology. In March last year, as court cases swirled around him, a series of AI images generated on Midjourney showing the former president being dramatically arrested went extremely viral.
Image credits: Truth Social