I discovered something like this recently when I tried the prompt "man throwing his smartphone into a river," and for the life of me I could not get DALL-E to render the phone separated from the hand (I tried "like a boomerang," "tossing," "into an ocean," "like a baseball," etc). And then it occurred to me that by the training data, there are virtually no pictures of a person and a phone where the phone is separated! So DALL-E might have thought that the phone was just an appendage to the body, the way the hand is (which, what does this say about society!). I might as well have asked DALL-E to render someone throwing their elbow into a river.

Another interesting case is animal-on-animal interactions. A prompt like, "small french bulldog confronts a deer in the woods" often yields weird things like the bulldog donning antlers! As far as the algorithm is concerned, it sees a bulldog, ticking the box for it, and it sees the antlers, ticking the box for "deer." The semantics don't seem to be fully formed.