Don’t Rush to Count to Five

When I see an AI image with an extra finger, I laugh first, too. The image gets enlarged, and I start counting. One, two, three, four, five—too many. That little thrill of cracking the case arrives very quickly, so quickly that before the face, the light, and the pose have been fully seen, the image has already been closed by a hand.

Of course, spotting a fake image requires flaws. It is just that counting to five is too effortless. Once a hand has been singled out, I retreat from being someone who might have been deceived to someone who has not been deceived. The image no longer needs to say anything else; it has already given itself away in one local detail. The screen is still lit, but judgment has already shut.

What is stranger is that, inside the image, the hand is also seized first. Some repairs do not begin by rescuing the whole person, but by pinning the hand down first, then letting the body grow back around it. In front of the screen, I seize the hand to judge an error; inside the image, the hand is seized for reconstruction. The two actions move in opposite directions, yet both first make the hand stop.

Counting to five requires a hand that has stopped working; hands in life, inconveniently, are always doing something. They grip the rim of a cup, block half a face, hold a microphone, lead another person, shrink into a cuff. They are rarely spread flat in the light, waiting for someone to count each finger clearly to the end. They always carry a little obstruction, exertion, awkwardness, or a posture that had no time to withdraw.

“AI has no body, so it cannot draw hands well” is a comforting sentence. It leaves the error to the machine and the body to us. But people with hands also turn hands into rulers; one extra finger or one missing segment does not automatically mean fake, and five fingers should not let an image end this quickly either.

Next time, the finger will still reach toward the screen, hovering over the glass, just short of finishing the count for that mistaken hand.