Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi pointed out that AI image generators are unable to make pictures of left-handed people while speaking at the Artificial Intelligence Action Summit in front of world leaders at the Grand Palais in Paris, France.
Modi used the example to highlight AI’s shortcomings, noting that text-to-image models cannot generate pictures of a person writing with their left hand, which sparked a wave of people testing it out for themselves.
“If you upload a medical report to an AI app it can explain in simple language, free of any jargon, what it means for your health,” Modi explained during the summit’s opening remarks yesterday. “But if you ask the same app to draw an image of someone writing with their left hand, the app will most likely draw someone writing with their right hand.”
At AI Action Summit, Prime Minister Narendra Modi stated, “If you ask the AI app to draw an image of someone writing with their left hand, the app will most likely draw someone writing with the right hand.”
I tested it on Grok and ChatGPT. In both cases, AI drew person writing… pic.twitter.com/S0g07SjFhe
— Anurag (@LekhakAnurag) February 11, 2025
The Prime Minister adds that AI’s inability to create a picture of a leftie is due to what’s in the training data. He uses the anecdote to warn of the “many vices we need to think carefully about” when it comes to AI.
Can You Generate an AI Image of a Person Writing With Their Right-Hand?
PetaPixel tested Modi’s hypothesis and found that he is right: AI image generators will not make pictures of left-handed people.
Despite being explicitly asked to “make a picture of someone writing with their left hand,” ChatGPT’s AI image generator, DALL-E, produced an almost identical image to the one in the X video above.
Stable Diffusion 3.5 received the same prompt and generated a bizarre, top-down image showing a right hand and a multi-dimensional pen drawing a sketch. While X’s Grok created four pictures of people all writing with their right hands.
Modi is correct when he says it is down to the training data. According to Healthline, roughly 10 percent of the population is left-handed and that means most photos of people writing show the pen in their right hand.
In a Google Image search for “people writing”, not a single leftie appears and it is the same when searching Shutterstock, one of the world’s largest stock photo websites. Why is this relevant? Because AI image generators are known to have been built via huge scrapes of the open web and so if there are none or very few images of people writing with their left hand then the AI will only know how to recreate an image of a right-handed person. It is a similar problem to AI image generators struggling to generate accurate pictures of human hands.
This is just one of the many pitfalls of the technology which is extremely controversial since, in most cases, the copyright holders weren’t asked before their photos were used for machine learning.
Image credits: Part of the header photo licensed via Depositphotos.