Tyla's "That Girl" Has an AI Problem
And the Six-Fingered Hand Isn't Even the Worst Part
Count those digits
There's a shot about forty seconds into "That Girl" where a hand comes up to a pair of glowing pink lips in a shush gesture. Cute idea. Except if you actually count the fingers, there are six of them. Not stylized. Not intentionally cartoonish in a Roger Rabbit sort of way. Just an extra finger, sitting there, because whatever generated that frame lost count.
I go back and watch it three times to make sure I'm not the one losing count. I'm not.
That single frame has become the whole story around Tyla's new video, and I think that's a shame, because it's actually not even the most damning piece of evidence. It's just the easiest one to scream about on TikTok.
Here's the thing about "That Girl" as a song: it's genuinely one of the better cuts on A*POP. Confident, a little cheeky, built for a video with real choreography, real color, real rhythm. Instead we get Tyla dropped into a flat, rotoscoped safari set next to an animated tiger that looks like it wandered in from a decade-old Sprite commercial, gesturing at diamonds and handbags that appear and vanish with no logic connecting one beat to the next.
The tiger is the tell that got the least attention, and it's the one that bothers me most. Watch how it moves. It's drawn in a flat 2D outline style — thin, glowing, almost neon-traced, like a coloring book page. Then it turns, and for one beat, it rotates like a 3D object with actual volume and perspective shift. A hand-drawn flat illustration doesn't do that. A rigged 3D model does that. A flat AI-generated image asked to "turn slightly" does that too, badly, and that's exactly what this looks like. It's not an animation choice. It's an animation seam.
And once you notice one seam, you start noticing all of them. The backgrounds shift in resolution and grain from shot to shot. Tyla's own interactions with the animated elements around her have that specific weightlessness where you can tell the human and the illustration were never actually looking at each other during a shoot — they were composited together after the fact, aimed in roughly the same direction and hoping for the best.
They’re fighting I guess?
None of this is really about AI as a boogeyman. I don't think every AI-assisted tool is evil, and I don't think using one automatically makes a video bad. What makes this video bad is that it doesn't seem to know what it's trying to say. There's no build. No structural idea carrying you from the first frame to the last. It's just a string of "fun" isolated beats, laid out at a pace so slow that even the transitions feel like they're stalling for time, waiting for the next idea to show up.
Tyla is having, objectively, one of the biggest years any pop artist is having right now. Sold out world tour on the way, RIAA plaques stacking up, a Bratz doll with her actual face on it. None of that is in question. What's in question is whether "That Girl" — a song that deserved a real visual moment — got handed the laziest possible version of one, dressed up with just enough neon and nostalgia-bait to hope nobody looked too closely.
Slop or not, it’s just plain sloppy.
I looked closely. There's a sixth finger. There's a tiger that briefly forgets it's supposed to be flat. And there's a video that, AI or not, plays like nobody in the room was asking the one question that actually matters: does this serve the song?
I don't think it does.
