Artificial Intelligence has been able to create some shockingly realistic videos, which many have seen as a threat to the arts. But maybe we shouldn’t worry, as a TikTok has shown that while AI might have mastered rendering hands, but our future robot overlords are now struggling to understand the next hurdle: Centaurs.
Imagine, if you will, a majestic half-man, half-equine creature, a truly magical being straight out of a fairytale. Your mind probably automatically created a centaur; a being with the head, torso, and arms of a man, but with the lower body of a horse, complete with four legs and a tail. That’s probably because you’ve seen one before — not in real life, of course, but in movies and shows like Harry Potter, Narnia, or Percy Jackson. Most people understand the concept; but now imagine you didn’t, imagine you’d never heard of a centaur before and re-read that description, how would you interpret that? Maybe you’d come up with something like this?
Or perhaps this?
Or possibly even this?
These are the images an AI came up with in an attempt to create a centaur for TikTok user Emily Anne, who was conducting “centaur research.” I’m going to be honest, I think I actually quite like some of these designs, it’s about time some new centaurs dropped. Why settle for the weak body arms and head type centaurs when you can have the Chad head centaur? That’s just one example, things only proceed to get worse as the TikTok goes on.
Oddly enough the AI seems to have a grasp of other fantasy creatures as the first image it creates is a pegasus which Emily points is “definitely not a centaur” — and she would know, she’s researching them. It does beg the question of how an AI can understand perfectly one example of a Greek mythological beast, yet fail so miserably at understanding another. Surely a half-man half-horse is easier to grasp than a half-horse half-bird with a unicorn horn?
Things continue to get more unhinged, with a later image featuring, inexplicably, a kangaroo jumping up at the centaur abomination? Like how do you even make that logical leap? Where does the kangaroo fit in this equation? Another attempt by the AI, which has clearly lost it’s mind at this point, gives Emily a horse with the torso of a man with a dove coming out the stomach, and the head on top of the torso is a horse’s head — oh, and one more thing, he’s also carrying a kangaroo, of course.
You know, it’s somewhat a relief to still see things like this, it’s a reminder that AI can’t do everything yet. And when it fails to comprehend something, boy, does it fail spectacularly. One day far in the future, when we’re all slaves to the robot overlord, we’ll always be able to look back and smile about the good old days when AI thought that the word “centaur” meant a horse-man-horse fighting a kangaroo.