As many who attend the ActiveRain Zoom calls know, using AI to design photos can be a lot of fun. There are many tools and platforms that can be used (free of charge at the moment) to design visuals such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Bing Images and more. The results of prompts can definitely be interesting!
So this morning I read an article on Popular Science that states that AI cannot properly design analog clocks that are set at a specific time. The article indicated that AI would put the numbers in the wrong place, and the hands aren't always actually in the clock. Apparently humans can read clocks, and AI cannot and the reasons aren't clear. Some of the hypothesis were that there aren't enough pictures of clocks at different times available for AI to learn how to tell time. Another thought is that AI doesn't have the visual perception needed to come up with an answer. And another issue is that for marketing purposes, 10:10 is usually the time set on analog watches, both in stores and online. So most AI tools come up with a clock at 10:10.
Here is the webpage that Popular Science shared so you can see what they saw - and below is a partial screenshot of their site so you don't have to go see for yourself.
This image was taken at 6:38 which is what the clocks should show as they were "live" clocks.
Well those were definitely not quite right. But as I am somewhat suspicious of everything I read online nowadays, I decided to try it for myself. Using various tools, I plugged in this prompt "I would like a picture of an analog clock set at 5:25." That seems simple enough! Here are the results:
The first thing I noticed is that all the clocks did display the numbers correctly, unlike those in the article above. The three top images were made using the Bing Image tool - but I tried a different AI platform each time. Dalle-3 was very pretty, but all three images were set at 10:10 and not at 5:25. Chat GPT almost had it right with a time of 5:22. Almost but not quite! Google's Gemini tool was correct in terms of the time. I tried to get Gemini to make the clock a lot prettier by asking for an antique clock but it returned the exact same response.
So in summary? At this point in time, Artificial Intelligence tools have difficulty reading "circle" time. Since this is such a simple concept for humans, I wonder what else AI might have trouble with? So use AI tools with care, and double check that everything in your photos are exactly as you want!!
Comments(28)