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Comment by skeeter2020 | Hacker News Reader

skeeter2020

>> - Put a strawberry in the left eye socket. >>- Put a blackberry in the right eye socket.

>> All five of the edits are implemented correctly

This is a GREAT example of the (not so) subtle mistakes AI will make in image generation, or code creation, or your future knee surgery. The model placed the specified items in the eye sockets based on the viewers left/right; when we talk relative in this scenario we usually (always?) mean from the perspective of the target or "owner". Doctors make this mistake too (they typically mark the correct side with a sharpie while the patient is still alert) but I'd be more concerned if we're "outsourcing" decision making without adequate oversight.

https://minimaxir.com/2025/11/nano-banana-prompts/#hello-nan...

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There's a classic well-illustrated book, _How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive_, which spends a whole illustrated page at the beginning building up a reference frame for working on the vehicle. Up is sky, down is ground, front is always vehicle's front, left is always vehicle's left.

Sounds a bit silly to write it out, but the diagram did a great job removing ambiguity when you expect someone to be laying on the ground in a tight place looking backwards, upside down.

Also feels important to note that in the theatre, there is stage-right and stage-left, jargon to disambiguate even though the jargon expects you to know the meaning to understand it.

Port and starboard

I guess car people use “driver side” and passenger side”, but the same car might be sold in mirror image versions

>This is a GREAT example of the (not so) subtle mistakes AI will make in image generation, or code creation, or your future knee surgery.

The mistake is in the prompting (not enough information). The AI did the best it could

"What's the biggest known planet" "Jupiter" "NO I MEANT IN THE UNIVERSE!"

No, this is squarely on the AI. A human would know what you mean without specific instructions.

I would not, I would clarify, and I think I'm a human.

Seems like you're making a judgment based on your own experience, but as another commenter pointed out, it was wrong. There are plenty of us out there who would confirm, because people are too flawed to trust. Humans double/triple check, especially under higher stakes conditions (surgery).

Heck, humans are so flawed, they'll put the things in the wrong eye socket even knowing full well exactly where they should go - something a computer literally couldn't do.

Why on earth would the fallback when a prompt is under specified be to do something no human expects?

Intelligence in my book includes error correction. Questioning possible mistakes is part of wisdom.

So the understanding that AI and HI are different entities altogether with only a subset of communication protocols between them will become more and more obvious, like some comments here are already implicitly telling.

“People are too flawed to trust”? You’ve lost the plot. People are trusted to perform complex tasks every single minute of every single day, and they overwhelmingly perform those tasks with minimal errors.

Extremely talented, studied, hard working humans perform complex tasks all the time, and never with 100% win rate over all time.

In other examples, almost every single person has had the experience of saying, "turn right", "oh I meant left sorry, I knew it was right too, I don't know why I said left". Even the most sophisticated humans have made this error. A computer would never.

Humans are deeply flawed and after pre-selection require expensive training to perform complex tasks at a never perfect success rate.

If the instructions were actually specific, e.g. Put a blackberry in its right eye socket, then yes, most humans would know what that meant. But the instructions were not that specific: in the right eye socket

Or be even more explicit: Put a strawberry in the person’s right eye socket.

If you asked me right now what the biggest known planet was, I'd think Jupiter. I'd assume you were talking about our solar system ("known" here implying there might be more planets out in the distant reaches).

But different humans would know what you meant differently. Some would have known it the same way the AI did.

I would be amused to see you test this theory with 100 men on the street

Yeah, just like humans always know what you mean.

It doesn't affect your point but technically since the IAU are insane, exoplanets aren't technically planets and Jupiter is the largest planet in the universe.

I suppose it was too much to hope that chatbots could be trained to avoid pointless pedantry.

They've been trained on every web forum on the Internet. How could it be possible for them to avoid that?

asking "x-most known y" and not expecting a global answer is odd

Every answer concerning planets is global.

Maybe! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toroidal_planet

Right, that's why one should use "put a strawberry in the portside eye socket" and "put a strawberry in the starboard side socket"

When it doubt, always use nautical terminology

> when we talk relative in this scenario we usually (always?) mean from the perspective of the target or "owner".

I dunno... I feel pretty confident 99% percent of people would do the same thing, and put the strawberry in the eye socket to our left, the viewer's.

You really have to be trained explicitly to put yourself in the subject's shoes, and very few people are. To me, the model is correctly following the instructions most people will mean.

And it's not even incorrect. "The left x" is linguistically ambiguous. If you say "the left flower", it's obviously the flower to our left. So when you say "the left eye socket", the eye socket to our left is a valid interpretation. If they had said their or its left eye socket, then it's more arguable that it must be from the subject's side. But that's not the case in this example.

There's a puzzle in the latest Indiana Jones game that exploits the fact that yes, most people would do the same thing.

I don't know if that's so much a mistake as it is ambiguity though? To me, using the viewer's perspective in this case seems totally reasonable.

Does it still use the viewer's perspective if the prompt specifies "Put a strawberry in the _patient's left eye_"? If it does, then you're onto something. Otherwise I completely disagree with this.

“Eye on the left” is different from “the left eye”. First can be ambiguous, second really isn’t.

I think "the left eye" in this particular case (a photo of a skull made of pancake batter) is still very slightly ambiguous. "The skull's left eye" would not be.

I guess there's some ambiguity regarding whether or not this can be ambiguous. Because it seems like it can to me.

Interesting, because I would say the opposite. "On the left" suggests left of image, "the left eye" could be any version of left.

“The right socket” can only be implied one way when talking about a body just like you only have one right hand despite the fact that it is on my left when looking at you.

"Plug into right power socket"

Same language, opposite meaning because of a particular noun + context.

I think the only thing obvious here is that there is no obvious solution other than adding lots of clarification to your prompt.

I think you missed the entire point?

No, they just disagree with you.

How do you disagree with having a right and a left hand?

GP is using right as in “correct”, not directionality.

No, I don't think they are.

If you are facing a wall-plate with two power sockets on it side by side and you are telling someone to plug something in, which one would be "the right socket", and which would be "the left socket"?

If above the wall-plate is a photo of a person and you are someone to draw a tattoo on the photo, which is "the right arm" and which is "the left arm"?

Same wording, different expectation.

Power plugs are not people.

ETA: and if I were telling someone which socket to plug something into, it would absolutely be from the prospective of the person doing the plugging, not from inside the wall.

Neither are sculptures of skulls made of pancake batter.

> Power plugs are not people.

Agreed. So the "obvious" meaning of left and right differ depend on context, which is what pphysch was pointing out.

I think the fact that anyone in this thread thinks it's ambiguous is proof by definition that it's ambiguous.

"Right hand" is practically a bigram that has more meaning, since handedness is such a common topic.

Also context matters, if you're talking to someone you would say "right shoulder" for _their_ right since you know it's an observer with different vantage point. Talking about a scene in a photo "the right shoulder" to me would more often mean right portion of the photo even if it was the person's left shoulder.

Having one person in the frame isn't enough to unambiguously put us into the "talking about a body" context.

That was a big problem when I was toying around the original Nano Banana. I always prompted the perspective of the (imaginary) camera, and yet NB often interpreted that as that of the target, giving no way to select the opposite side. Since the selected side is generally closer to the camera, my usual workaround is to force the side far from the camera. And yet that was not perfect.

I meant to add a clarification to that point (because the ambiguity is a valid counterpoint), thanks for the reminder.

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