I don’t know much about career criminals, but I have to assume they’re on the cutting edge of technology when it comes to ways to avoid getting caught by the fuzz. One excellent suggestion for our current cultural moment came from comic artist Dan, who found a ring of a fake ring finger – try saying that ten times fast – online and tweeted, “Criminals will start wearing extra prosthetic fingers to make surveillance footage look like it's AI generated and thus inadmissible as evidence.”


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For the uninitiated, despite the advancements that have been made in A.I. image generation recently, A.I. continues to struggle with accurately depicting human hands. Countless A.I.-generated images have gone viral with people praising their realism only to realize that the people depicted in the images have incredibly messed up hands; if the A.I. hasn’t given them six, or seven, or eight fingers, it’s made their five fingers weirdly long and slender. In many cases, when people are trying to figure out if an image has been generated by A.I. or not, others will point out that the hands give the game away. We’ll undoubtedly face a whole slew of new problems once A.I. figures out how to accurately portray human hands, but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.


This brings us back to the FINGERring, a piece of wearable art created by Berlin-based visual artist Nadja Buttendorf based on the artist’s ring finger. Made from silicone, Buttendorf created the FINGERring in 2016, never imagining its potential uses in this strange new world overrun with A.I.-generated six-fingered humanoid entities.



Another Twitter user recently shared the FINGERring, which unfortunately for budding criminals everywhere is not for sale, with the caption, “becoming-imperceptible.” That’s the dream, isn’t it? They can’t arrest you if they can’t perceive you, or better yet if they perceive you to be nothing more than an A.I.-generated person with Polydactyly. To really commit, however, you should probably invest in somehow getting more teeth inserted into your mouth, just to be safe.