When I asked ChatGPT for an image to illustrate “The Pianist’s Hands,” the short story I wrote with ChatGPT and posted earlier this week, I thought it was gorgeous and (for a few minutes) an “absolutely, breathtakingly PERFECT!!!” image to accompany the text.

And then I noticed something weird.

I wanted the pianist to be seen from the point of view of the orchestra, specifically from behind the violin section, with blurred images of violins and bows in the foreground near the bottom of the image.

Look at how ChatGPT decided to compose the lower left corner of my picture.

“The Pianist’s Hands,” to accompany the short story by Katherine Wikoff (with ChatGPT assists)

That’s a left-handed violinist!

Now, maybe turning things around like that, essentially creating a mirror image to complement the violins over on the right, allowed ChatGPT to balance out the use of space more evenly there at the bottom of the frame.

But so strange! A human artist would (presumably) never do that—create an image that was so factually wrong just to fill up a space pleasingly. It never even occurred to me that I might need to provide instruction for which way the bows ought to be facing. Yet, although I saw the issue almost immediately, I liked the overall image so much that I didn’t want to have ChatGPT start fooling around with it to fix that “technical” issue—because as I’ve learned the hard way, ChatGPT can’t just fix something, it creates a whole new image from scratch.

So I just decided to let it go, and published the image as is.

Then a short while later, I found myself wondering: Just how many left-handed professional violinists are there in the world anyway?

Well, lots. According to Google’s AI overview, roughly 10% of all violinists are left-handed.

But basically no one in a professional orchestra has ever played a left-handed violin in the same way Paul McCartney plays a left-handed bass. Tradition (plus practical logistics, in terms of avoiding crashing bows) dictates that left-handed violinists play in the same manner that right-handed violinists do. If anyone were to play a left-handed instrument, they’d probably need to be seated somewhere on the outside and maybe in the rear of the violin section to keep from tangling up their bow with anyone else’s.

I have to add that ever since childhood I’ve loved watching the simultaneous, en masse up-and-down movements of an entire violin section’s bows during a performance. It vaguely reminded me of the Rockettes’ kick line. My kids ended up playing violin in their school orchestras, so I know that bowing technique and synchronous bowing do have an impact on sound. But to be honest, and yes, this has zero relationship to sound quality, I think having one bow moving at odds with all the rest would severely damage the visual aesthetic

Which is exactly what ChatGPT inadvertently did to my “Pianist’s Hands” picture, even as (I assume) it was intending to create a more balanced composition.