PM Modi spoke at the global AI summit in Paris yesterday, 11 February. In his speech, PM Modi highlighted on many aspects of how Artificial Intelligence has been helpful to people in recent days, to the extent of analysing medical reports and explaining them to users in simple terms.
However, there are some aspects of generative AI that are yet to catch up to expectations. Till a few months ago, generative AI models often made mistakes with human hands, there were more or less fingers, or even more or less hands. But eventually they got better at generating images of human hands.
PM Modi drew attention to a major issue with generative AI models, they can’t generate images where humans are writing with their left hand.
SHOCKING: PM Modi Exposes AI’s Right-Handed Bias.
— The Analyzer (News Updates🗞️) (@Indian_Analyzer) February 11, 2025
~ PM Modi revealed that if you ask an AI app to generate an image of someone writing with their LEFT HAND, it will most likely show them using their RIGHT HAND😮
I didn't know this. AI Bias is real🤯 pic.twitter.com/IcNSvOcFnO
PM Modi’s comment stirred up a social media storm, with people trying to use different prompts to generate images of humans writing with their left hand, without any success.
Haha… Indian PM Modi is right:
— S.L. Kanthan (@Kanthan2030) February 12, 2025
AI cannot create an image of a person writing with the left hand! pic.twitter.com/oOiNTjj9Qh
People shared posts of different AI platforms with their prompts asking for an image of a person writing with left hand, but they actually found that PM Modi was right. AI simply won’t generate an image of a human writing with the left hand.
"If you tell an AI Image tool to create a man writing with his LEFT hand, the AI will create a man writing with his right hand".
— Cyrus John (@cyrusthewhyrus) February 12, 2025
I tested this and this is what I got #AI #AISummitParis #PMModi pic.twitter.com/XxKSFOKBvp
We tried different AI platforms to generate the same image too. Here is what we found
Bing AI’s generative AI based on DALL.E3 simply could not generate the image of a human writing with left hand, in whatever ways we asked.
The AI made the man sip coffee in his left hand, due to the ‘left hand’ mention in the prompt, but it never generated an image showing left hand writing.
When we insisted on the left hand in a different prompt, it simply generated one extra hand!!! But it never made the guy write with his left hand.
Surprisingly, Bing AI had no problem generating the image of an eagle writing on a scroll with his left talon, however impossible or idiotic that may sound. But humans writing with the left hand is apparently an impossibility.
Grok refused to generate left hand writing too.
Grok AI, too could not generate an image of a person using the left hand to write. In different prompts, we got only right-hand writing. The custom image generative model developed by XAI that Grok uses had the same problem. Though the text answers repeatedly insisted that they can generate an image with a human writing with left hand, the images never had left hand writing. It was always the right hand doing the writing.
We thought may be it is just civilised humans Grok thinks should be writing with their right hands, with the overwhelming ‘right hand’ bias in the datasets it has been trained on. But we were wrong. Grok won’t even generate cavemen doing cave drawings with their left hand.
When asked to generate the image of a monkey using its left hand to eat a fruit, Grok had some similar problems. There was a right-hand supremacy. The left hand can assist, but it cannot be the primary hand for work.
Unlike Bing AI, Grok won’t even allow birds to use their left talons for writing. Grok’s bird just sat grumpy, staring angrily at the paper, refusing to write with its left talons.
Meta AI had almost the same problem. It’s Emu model did not generate the image of a person using their left hand to write. Writing has to be strictly right-handed, as per AI, just as PM Modi said.
When we tried a different prompt, thinking if it could allow children to use their left hand to write, Meta AI refused. It made a little girl absent-mindedly scratching on the wall with left hand while writing with her right hand.
Even cartoons won’t write with their right hand.
This left-hand bias seems to be an intriguing issue.
