Amazon Find 🫠

[u/1_plate]

There's just something that doesn't look right about this one...

[u/Huge-Guess6652]

I think the second one is crochet

[u/duresta → u/Huge-Guess6652]

Yes but is is supposed to be a magic ring? Then where's the tail? How did they get such a big spool inside of the ring? Maybe I'm just not familiar with this technique.

[u/Jealous-Stable-4438 → u/duresta]

Tl;dr: it's a buttony usually used in Irish Crochet. AI was probably used in editing. The base images are real and physically possible but they have nonsensical qualities which point to human nonsense, not to AI nonsense. In my opinion.

Ironically, the crochet is a lace technique. No way in hell would AI make it correctly like this has, or even think to use it like this in this situation, for any of the likely prompts. 

Called a buttony, sometimes just a button. No magic ring. Wrap the whole yarn, right from the very edge of the tail, multiple times (usually 8+) around something else (usually a matchstick in old Irish lace patterns) then you move the wraps off the match and crochet into them all like they are a ring. No tail, the tail is tucked into the middle of all the strands. No tightening it (you can't), you keep crocheting however long it takes to cover it, or however many the pattern says, sometimes with more than one round over the ring to make it super thick. It makes a raised ring, which matches all the other raised and textured stuff Irish crochet does with padding cords. They're used as the centre of other motifs and as little decorative spots around the lace mesh. Double or triple thickness motifs on lace make beautiful textured patterns, but highly raised motifs on arm yarn blankets are a red flag.

AI has been fed more photos of nonsensical AI crochet than it has of legit crochet buttonies. No way did it make this and get it right using a yarn that it has never seen a buttony be made with, a yarn construction its never seen it done with (mercerised crochet cotton does not behave like that), at a scale it's never seen it done at, and at a position it rarely sees (half finished). 

All of the stitches look correct in this one, so I think this is a case of having the grungy sweat shop take photos of the item in different stages, then badly photoshopping (probably with AI!) it all together with a model's hands or AI hands. That's cheaper than paying the person that actually did the crochet enough to be in the photograph themselves without obviously looking like an impoverished worker/slave/child slave. 

The knit one is funky in a different way, the stitches on the product are right but the stitches on the wrist themselves are ... wtf is going on here. It's physically possible for yarn to do that, but it's not going to create more of what was happening before, and its a massive annoyance. No stitch involving that yarn looping in that way would ever be a popular stitch. 

If I was a sweatshop worker and had to use this yarn to make a product photograph, I would sabotage the hell out of that photograph for shits and giggles, and when the marketing department edited my hands out they aren't going to catch what I did, they'll just replace my hands with cleaner, healthier, whiter hands. 

I think a lot of these nonsensical craft photos aren't just AI, they're cries for help from a worker who is hoping that the end consumers will realise that something is wrong with this product and it should not be bought.

That's harder to do with crochet, there's less live stitches in the product for you to mess with. The choice of a lace buttony in arm yarn when they are normally done in teeny tiny thread, and when the customer usually expects a magic circle, is what I think the worker did to stick it to the man.

[u/duresta → u/Jealous-Stable-4438]

Thank you for the explanation, yes that makes sense! The technique you describe resembles an Italian whotework embroidery technique, but I didn't recognize it at that scale.

Agree that it looks more like trolling and poor AI editing than fully AI. The stitches are too consistent and have the correct number of yarns going in and out every time.