The improvement in AI’s depiction of hands over the past year makes me think of these AI teams just putting in tons and tons and tons of hand images, then maybe setting up adversarial networks to try and detect fake hands.

And then I remembered it’s a common thing for human artists too. It’s typical for there to be a period with a focus on hands, just sketching and sketching and studying.

Maybe hands are like faces somehow in that we process them in higher resolution. I’ve heard faces described that way, but I wonder if hands get enhanced salience from our evolutionary past.

We do have a long history of armed warfare as a species. Maybe being able to detect what your possible enemy might be holding was a major selective pressure and now we’re all the descendants of apes who were obsessed with hands.