Amazon’s AI Garbage Poster For An F1 Documentary Shows Why We Don’t Use AI

I’m not entirely opposed to the use of AI art. Like an airbrush or Photoshop or a Sharpie on drywall, it’s just another tool that can be used to create art. A powerful tool, sure, but just that: a tool. It’s a great way to get a start on something, or to, say, extend the background of a photo source being used in a larger project, or help to flesh out ideas, quickly. If you’re using it to create finished results on its own, without an actual human artist in control, you’re doing it wrong. Which seems to be precisely what Amazon Prime is doing right now, at least if the on-screen art for the documentary Racing Through Time is any indicator. The AI-generated art used for the poster image is so egregiously bad it caught the attention of Reddit’s r/formula1 forum, and it’s also a good reminder of the limitations of AI art, which all stem from the fact that, really, AI is an idiot.

The uproar from this has been pretty significant, which I think is quite healthy, like a horse sneezing at bad hay. I think I stole that analogy from Orwell’s 1984, by the way, which makes sense, because what the hell do I know about how horses react to hay? But the idea still holds: people can sense something wrong with these purely AI-generated images, and they’re right to call them out. Because they’re garbage.

The reaction has been covered online a good amount too, which is interesting, because, fundamentally, you wouldn’t think it’s all that newsworthy. This is some background art for an old documentary being shown on Amazon Prime Video. It’s hardly Earth-shattering news.

But, there’s more here, because it’s AI-generated, and we’re seeing both the limitations of AI and testing the limits of what we, the public, will accept. Here’s the big image in question:

At first glance, it seems fine. It’s a lineup of F1 cars on the track. But as soon as you start looking more closely, things rapidly start to fall apart. Like, this car, for instance:

Again, at a glance, it looks like a modern F1 car. then you notice the irregular and confusing structure behind the driver, the peculiar asymmetry, the wing that appears to be missing the entire left section, the wheel camber that doesn’t make sense – it’s a lot of little bits of weirdness that add up to a mess.

Or how about this one:

Hey, look, a three-wheeled car! That’s a bold choice! I guess if those Tyrell P34s could have six wheels, three must be half as good, right? There’s also plenty of asymmetry and confusing mounting systems and more nonsense here, too.

Maybe to make up for the tricycle-inspired three-wheeler F1 cars, this one seems to have six wheels? Sort of? They’re all almost wheels, but maybe not quite? The rear ones could be part of the wing? It’s very hard to tell. That helmet is shocking egg-shaped, too, and that front wing makes the bold choice not to extend all the way across the car.

As we go further rearward in the pack, the cars become less and less F1-like. What are those cars in the upper row there? That bluish-silver one looks sort of like a forgotten 1990s Chrysler concept car and the red one to the right feels like a Lincoln MKS coupé that never happened.

The point is, this is garbage. And, it’s the specific kind of garbage that genuinely unsettles people, because it’s uncanny valley sort of garbage. I know “uncanny valley” is used to describe human images that aren’t quite right, but I think the concept applies to cars as well. That’s because those of us who care about cars care very much about the specifics of cars. We care about the way they’re put together and the details that make one type of car different than another, no matter how minuscule or mundane seeming that may be to more healthily-adjusted people. In fact, the more obscure and specific, the better.

AI doesn’t understand any of this, because AI fundamentally doesn’t understand anything. We call it “artificial intelligence” but it’s not, not really, because it works so differently from how our brains work. It’s refining images from noise based on a massive dataset and comparing iterations at incredible speeds to end up with something that looks like what the prompt’s referenced target images are. But it has no idea what it’s making.

It doesn’t know that these F1 cars look ridiculous because it doesn’t know what an F1 car is. It doesn’t know what a tuna sandwich is, either, or a drill press or a vulva or a horse or anything. It has no idea what accurate is or how anything works or what is true or not. And that’s why we can never use AI alone for anything we do.

Cars are too specific; I can’t have AI generate an image of a 1971 Jensen Interceptor and end up with something I can actually use. Here, let’s try just that and see what happens! First, here’s a picture of a ’71 Interceptor, from the Beverly Hills Car Club for reference:

Okay, so let’s tell the AI to make me a 1971 Jensen Interceptor without me specifically showing it that reference image, and see what we get:

These are all very cool cars, and all feel appropriate for the era, but none of them are Jensen Interceptors.

I love this one, it feels like something Iso may have built in the late ’60s, but, again, it’s not an Interceptor. So this is useless, unless I somehow need a fictional car, which we do sometimes, but mostly we’re writing about cars that actually exist, because those are the cars you can drive and experience and, you know, were real.

Giving the AI the specific reference image sort of helped? But not really:

The front ends are a bit more constrained to something sort of Interceptor-like, but they’re still useless if I’m actually writing about an Interceptor.

This is a cool-looking car, one I might even say reminded me of a Jensen Interceptor, but it’s not one. And, as such, it’s unusable, save for fiction or perhaps background filler.

And even for less specific things, things that don’t necessarily require a reality-accurate car, AI just doesn’t understand humans enough to be useful. Take our topshot images, for example. Yesterday, I wrote a rant about how much modern electronic door handles piss me off, and I made this for the top image:

There’s text there, there’s a car and a callout to what I’m talking about. It’s not the best topshot I’ve ever made, but it works. Here’s what I got when I asked AI to make an image for an article complaining about modern complex car door handles:

What the hell is that? I guess some sort of door handles? It’s absolutely useless as a top image, and it hurts my brain to even look at it.

My whole point is that, at least at our current level of development, AI can not replace a human. It can help, certainly, it can be an incredible tool, no question, but there always needs to be a pair of knowledgable human eyes on the result, otherwise we get situations like this F1 mess.

And it’s not just like normal bad art. It’s actively more insulting, because it telegraphs that the entity that put the AI garbage out just doesn’t care. Quick and cheap is all that matters to places that do this kind of shit, and it’s good people see it and call it out. AI is only going to take all our jobs if we accept that everything will be shit, and we don’t have to do that.

So, everyone, feel free to mock and shame Amazon for this craptacular F1 image! For the good of humanity!

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