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Comment by songbird23 | Hacker News Reader

i know of generative AI but dont know crocheting. I could not tell whether that image she posted was realistically doable by hand or AI

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(my wife crochets).

Crochet figures generally look 'pixelated', where a pixel is a single stitch. The eyes on these figures don't look stitched at all. The hair looks like waves of material that also lack a stitched look (compared with the faces). The curves of the lower lip cut across stitches (going by the size of the stitches on the adjacent skin) and don't have that pixelated look.

[Edit] Also, I don't know what these crochet sites generally show, but in the pictures I've seen, it's usual to show the figure against a plain backdrop or on a table, not part of a scene with a detailed background (which in this case, also lacks stitches)

Look at the face, does it look like a photo with a yarn texture applied, or does it look made of yarn?

The only thing that gives it away for me is that I can’t imagine how the lips would be done, and I’m not 100% sure it is impossible (I don’t know anything about crocheting).

There’s a lot of other giveaways - the hair on the left and middle doll would just be loose yarn or thread, there’s no stitching, and getting them to that kind of detail and consistency would be a nightmare. The noses all lack any stitch definition but simultaneously seem to blend into the face fabric. The sleeve on the left one is layered in a way that would be near-impossible imo in a crochet context. There’s a ton of gauge changes (the yarn size getting smaller/larger) which, while not impossible, would be very very difficult especially at the size it appears to be. The tiny hands would be painstaking at best. Then there’s some felting for the white “V” on the left dress and embroidery for the details on the dresses and crown. If anyone could actually make those to match the image it would be hundreds of hours and never look nearly that perfect.

The noses did look a little suspicious, come to think of it.

For the hair, I guess it didn’t really stand out, I’d believe it was possible to get pre-made doll wigs or something like that. Thinking about it, though, it does seem a bit odd that it would look like bundled yarn up top and then more like hair in the back.

For the hands, it is kind of funny, I’m not sure if it is an artifact of the typical “AI is bad at hands” thing or “intentional” (to the extent that the output of a ML model can be called intentional), but the hands do appear to have some mistakes.

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