Polish Prime Minister's Office Publishes AI Graphic With Two Left Hands

On July 8, Poland's Chancellery of the Prime Minister (Kancelaria Prezesa Rady Ministrów, the Polish PM's office) published a graphic promoting the KPO recovery fund program in which the two people shaking hands each have two left hands. The error, a mistake typical of AI image generators, was spotted by Michał Dworczyk, who himself once headed the same office under Mateusz Morawiecki's government.

The graphic was meant to serve as a simple backdrop for a message about the changes brought by the Krajowy Plan Odbudowy (KPO, Poland's National Recovery Plan). Only on closer inspection did it reveal an anatomical error typical of image-generating tools - instead of a classic handshake, the picture shows two identical left hands on both sides.

Who Spotted the Error

The first to flag the blunder was Michał Dworczyk, a member of parliament for the Law and Justice party (Prawo i Sprawiedliwość, PiS) and former head of the same Chancellery under Mateusz Morawiecki's government. That makes the criticism notable, since it came from someone who for years was himself responsible for that very institution and its communications materials.

Rather than explain the situation or admit the mistake, the office opted for the simplest solution: the graphic disappeared from Facebook without any statement. No one at the Prime Minister's Office officially confirmed which tool was used to create the image or why it was published without prior review.

Not an Isolated Case

This is already the second time in recent months that Poland's government administration has run into trouble over AI-edited visual material. Earlier, deputy minister Magdalena Sobkowiak-Czarnecka published a photo in which AI tools altered the faces of several people, removed text from one participant's T-shirt, and modified elements of a military uniform so that they no longer matched reality.

The defense ministry explained the incident at the time as an unintended modification that occurred while improving the photo's quality, and apologized for the confusion. However, the scale of the alteration, covering faces and uniform details, raised more questions than the explanation managed to resolve.

Why This Is No Joke

Anatomical errors in generated hands are a well-known, recurring problem across most popular image generators, even though makers have claimed for two years to be gradually eliminating it. The publication of such material by the country's top government office shows that, in practice, AI-generated graphics reach official channels without basic visual review before publication.

The problem goes beyond aesthetics. If officials are turning to image generators to promote government programs, the same question applies to photos from events, speeches, or official documentation, where retouching faces or uniform elements, as in the Sobkowiak-Czarnecka case, raises far more serious doubts than a failed handshake.

Someone needs to take away the government's access to AI - comment on the Prime Minister's Office blunder, Spider's Web

Clear Rules Are Missing

Poland still has no uniform, publicly known guidelines for government offices on when and how generative AI may be used in official materials, or who is responsible for reviewing such publications before release. Each ministry and each chancellery handles the matter its own way, and with a growing number of similar blunders, this is starting to look like a systemic gap rather than a series of isolated mistakes by individual staffers.

For a public institution, the cost of such a blunder is mainly reputational, but it points to a mechanism that could have more far-reaching consequences with more serious material, from undermining the credibility of government communications to questions about what else in official messaging has been machine-generated or altered without disclosure.

The two-left-hands episode won't hurt anyone on its own, but combined with the earlier photo-retouching case involving the deputy defense minister, it forms a pattern: Polish government offices are adopting AI tools faster than they are developing procedures to control them. The next incident could involve something more consequential than a badly rendered hand.

Sources: Someone Needs to Take Away the Government's Access to AI (spidersweb.pl)