One of the best parts of my job is laughing at the truly terrible, deeply flawed, occasionally frightening AI images that pop out while I review different AI image generators. I spend a lot of time playing around with AI in ChatGPT, Midjourney and Adobe, and I've learned that no AI generator is perfect. But there are some common patterns, things that many AIs struggle with.
Every image generator is unique, but I've spent enough time with them to recognize some patterns. There are certain things AIs are prone to mess up -- fingers on hands, overlapping elements, extremely fine details, etcetera. Some AI image programs give you tools to edit these mistakes, which is great. But when you can't, these are my tried-and-true tips for tweaking your prompts and settings to fix your images.
These are the biggest problems I found and how to fix them. For more, check out the best AI image generators and our guide to effective AI image prompt writing.
Human faces and expressions
Katelyn Chedraoui via Canva Magic Media AI/CNET
Accurate facial expressions continually challenge AI generators. Quirky eyes, teeth and eyebrows are some of the strongest indicators that an image is AI-generated. In this case, the result was extremely funny to me, if also completely unusable. The girls are sporting some Halloween-like vampire teeth, and the dude in the back is having more than a bad hair day.
Stephen Shankland via Dall-E 3/CNET
Even with cartoon or non-realistic characters, generators struggle to moderate emotion and expressions. This image -- created by our best pick, Dall-E 3 -- over-amplified the prompt, and the end result was too dramatic. I'm a self-identified neat freak, but I can't imagine anyone getting this upset over what looks like hundreds of dollars of cleaning supplies. Even the best programs can fail and produce wonky results.
How to fix it: I recommend asking the service to cut down on the number of people it's trying to render -- cut down on the number of chances for error -- and using post-generation editing tools to select specific parts of the image that need regenerated or fixed. Picking a more mild adjective ("angry" rather than "enraged") might help guide the service down the right path.
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