Here at The Autopian, we have some very stern rules when it comes to the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the content we produce. While our crack design team may occasionally employ AI as a tool in generating images, we’ll never just use AI on its own to do anything – not just for ethical reasons, but because we often want images of specific cars, and AI fundamentally doesn’t understand anything. When an AI generates an image of a car, it has no idea if that car ever actually existed or not. An AI doesn’t have ideas at all, in fact – it’s just scraped data being assembled with a glorified assembly of if-then-else commands.
This is an even bigger factor in AI-generated copy. We’ll never use it because AI has no idea what the hell it’s writing about, and so has no clue if anything is actually true, and since ChatGPT has never driven a car, I don’t really trust its “insights” into anything automotive.
These sort of rules are hardly universal in our industry, though, so if we ever wanted confirmation that our no-AI-copy rule was the right way, we’re lucky enough to be able to get such reassurance pretty easily. For example, all we have to do is read this dazzlingly shitty article re-published over on Yahoo Finance about the worst cars people have owned.
Maybe it’s not AI? Maybe this “Kellan Jansen” is an actual writer who actually wrote this, and in that case, I feel bad both for this coming excoriation and about whatever happened to them to cause them to be in the state they seem to be in. The article is shallow and terrible and gleefully, hilariously wrong in several places.
I guess I should also note that we don’t use AI because the 48K Sinclair Spectrum workstations we use here don’t quite have the power to run any AI. Well, we do have one AI that we use on them, our Artificial Ignorance system that we employ to get just that special je ne sais quoi in every post we write. Oh, and our AI (Artificial Indignation) tools help with our hot takes, too. So, two.
Okay, but let’s get back to the Yahoo Finance article, titled “The Worst Car I Ever Owned: 9 People Share Which Vehicles Aren’t Worth Your Money,” which is a conceptually lazy article that is just taking the responses to a Reddit post called “What’s the worst car you have personally owned?” which makes this story basically just a re-write of a Reddit post. It seems like the Reddit post was fed into whatever AI half-assed its way through generating the article, based on these results.
The results are, predictably, shitty, but also still worthy of pointing out because come on. There’s this, for example:
2023 BMW BRZ
BMWs are a frequent source of frustration for car owners on Reddit. Just ask user “Hurr1canE_.”
They bought a 2023 BMW BRZ and almost immediately started experiencing problems. Their turbo started blowing white smoke within two weeks of buying the car, and the engine blew up within 5,000 miles.
The Reddit user also had these issues with the car:
- Air valve
- Computer software and control module
- Transmission
Other users mention poor experiences with BMW X3s and 540i Sport Wagons. It’s enough to suggest you think carefully before making one of these your next vehicle.
The fuck? What is a BMW BRZ? This is such a perfect example of why AI-generated articles are garbage: they make shit up. Maybe that’s anthropomorphizing the un-sentient algorithm too much, but the point is that it’s writing, with all the confidence of a drunk uncle about to belly-flop into a pool, about a car that simply does not exist.
And, if you look at the Reddit post, it’s easy to see what happened:
The Redditor had their current car, a 2023 [Subaru] BRZ in their little under-name caption (their flair), and the dumb AI processed that into the mix, and, being a dumb computer algorithm that doesn’t know from cars or clams, conflated the car being talked about with the one the poster actually owns. You know, like how a drooling simpleton might.
There’s more of this, too. Like this one:
Ah, yes, the F10 550i. So many of us have been burned by that F10 brand, have we not? Or, at least, we would have, if such a brand existed, which it doesn’t. What seems to have happened here is the AI found a user complaining about a “2011 F10 550i” but didn’t know enough to realize this was a user talking about their BMW 5 series, and yes, F10 refers to the 5-series cars made between 2010 to 2016, but nobody would refer to this car out of context in a general-interest article on a financial site without mentioning BMW, would they? I mean, no human would, but we don’t seem to be dealing with a human, just a dumb machine.
Even if we ignore the made-up car makes and models, the vague and useless issues listed, and the fact that the article is nothing more than a re-tread of a random Reddit post, there’s no escaping that this entire thing is useless garbage, an unmitigated waste of time. What is learned by reading this article? What is gained? Nothing, absolutely nothing.
And it’s not like this is on some no-name site; it was published on Yahoo! Finance, well, after first appearing on GOBankingRates.com, that mainstay of automotive journalism. It all just makes me angry because there are innocent normies out there, reading Yahoo! Finance, maybe with some mild interest in cars, and now their heads are getting filled with information that is simply wrong.
People deserve better than this garbage. And this was just something innocuous; what if some overpaid seat-dampener at Yahoo decides that they’ll have AI write articles about actually driving or something that involves actual safety, and there’s no attempt made to confirm that the text AI poops out has any basis in fact at all?
We don’t need this. AI-generated crapticles like these are just going to clog Google searches and load the web up full of insipid, inaccurate garbage, and that’s my job, dammit.
Seriously, though, we’re at an interesting transition point right now; these kinds of articles are still new, and while I don’t know if there’s any way we can stop the internet from becoming polluted with this sort of crap, maybe we can at least complain about it, loudly. Then we can say we Did Something.
(Thanks, Isaac!)
better than most non-AI Yahoo “journalism” tho LOL
The best part of Yahoo News is the comments section, filling in the blanks of Yahoo’s middle school journalism quality articles
Torch, are we fully honest here ?
I remember some weeks ago, i think during aweekend, several unsigned or signed by an unknown unintroduce writer, that were utter shit. Clearly could have been AI generated, and people said so in the comments.
Who was it? so I can go look at them too.
I saw this article this morning in an app that aggregates items from a wide variety of internet sources and had the same AI thoughts.
Sadly, a Google search reveals there may be a real-life Kellan Jansen, complete with a LinkedIn profile and an author bio at GOBankingRates.com. Of course, that may just be another layer of AI subterfuge.
He’s a content creator. If you check his profile on https://muckrack.com/kellan-jansen/articles, he has numerous repeats of every single content piece he creates listed on different sites.
Maybe it’s just journalist being, you know, journalists. They get paid to write about shit they don’t know about, supervised by some moron counting words or clicks, just to make “content” that nobody reads. But it must help fill some business metric, I guess.
AI will only exacerbate mediocrity at all levels.
Wait until judges and lawyers start to use it with the same moronic abandon as some Tesla-stans that take a nap, watch porn or play tetris (or all the avobe together) while doing 130 km/h on the highway. What, they already did?
They did my friend!
https://www.forbes.com/sites/mollybohannon/2023/06/08/lawyer-used-chatgpt-in-court-and-cited-fake-cases-a-judge-is-considering-sanctions/
Also that makes me think of all the “experts” and “scientists” of late
There are rats in every industry, sadly, and some are particularly well-hung (and built with a computer algorithm trained on stolen art). https://defector.com/the-brief-and-wondrous-life-of-the-ai-giant-penised-rat-explained
> “These figures are clearly not scientifically correct, but if such botched illustrations can pass peer review so easily, more realistic-looking AI-generated figures have likely already infiltrated the scientific literature”
I’m less worried about illustrations than about fake data, fake statistics, and imaginary findings, TBH. Peer review has been the gold standard to weed out the frauds, but if Mr Rat Thundercock over here can get through when a 7 year old could see it has issues, then you have to wonder how much plausible-looking fake science is being published.
I’m laughing like a madman with that article. Thanks Stef, you made my day!
God damn there are not enough stars for that link!
Also not AI but just as bad scientists(your link reminded me of it):
https://www.wral.com/story/with-canine-sex-and-hooters-hoaxes-point-at-weakness-in-journals/17894156/
Many reporting user comments generated by AI. Close examination of meta reports collaborate user ID AI, with sentient waffles corralling constable forecast metamorphosis. Clamor idle situation at convergence dichotomy.
Beautifum!
”You can buy this BMW BRZ for the price of a Mitsubishi Mustang”
I prefer the Maybatsu Monstrocity okay? I guess rockstar was way ahead of everyone in using AI 🙂
The lovely part of filling the internet with AI generated nonsense is that this becomes a self powered cyclone from hell. The next article AI writes will reference those AI articles, creating whirling cess pool of constantly degrading nonsense.
Interesting experiment. How long will the result is only a word salad? How long till that word salad is only a letter salad? How long till the intelligence curve swings back up and the results become a new AI language? How long till AI figures we are too stupid to understand the new language and it ends us all?
Most Americans don’t eat enough salads so it’s a good thing.
A taco salad is still a salad
lots of things are salads
Not soon enough.
Username checks out
Skynet is coming for us all!
I can’t wait until this article shows up on Livelively.com or some other assorted twaddle generator after being retitled “Random Meat Puppet Needs to Learn His Place, Also Bad Cars are Bad”.
I full on laughed out loud at your article name. Good on ya!
As a meat puppet I feel offended.
Another funny enjoyable article. But Jason weren’t you a little tough o. The AI? I mean who among us human types hasn’t been a victim of Autocorrect?
But no worries this is why I get all my car information from the Autopian and all my sports News from the Pittsburgh sports teams websites.
Every ducking time I try to text when I’m angry.
I think the text editor on my iPhone is controlled by the Church Lady.
It refuses to remember many of my most favored offensive words and phrases.
My samsung is learning well. It’s auto fill knows all my favorite bad words. I can’t even let my daughter use my phone at this point
> who among us human types hasn’t been a victim of Autocorrect
No risk of that happening on this site as spell check is chronically MIA :p
It’s somewhat comical now but I genuinely fear for the future. Propegating misinformation has already been a problem on the internet, but now people are reading stupid shit like this, thinking it’s real, and presenting it as fact. And if you try to argue against it using data and facts, someone can just as easily come along and point to some website that spouts some nonsense that supports their point, because they genuinely believe it’s real.
I already shake my head at every stupid Facebook post suggested to me with a *CLEARLY* AI generated image but hundreds of comments below from smooth brains thinking it’s real. Like this image of a “Corvette meet” in a parking lot which made the rounds a few months ago. Anyone with half a brain can see that the cars in the background are all distorted and the proportions couldn’t exist in real life, but sadly I’ve found lots of people out there, especially in this hobby, do not possess half a brain.
https://www.corvetteblogger.com/images/content/2023-2/110323_3.jpg
Plus none of the shoes are actually New Balance.
COTD ????
I fear for the future too. The amount of people I know who have had their brains broken by the level of misinformation on the internet today is shocking, and that’s mostly just with blurry pictures, bad Photoshop, and conspiracy loons. Adding AI videos, pictures, and articles to it? It will be like a never-ending, self-perpetuating tornado of bullshit.
Right, at least conspiracy loons are usually *intentionally* presenting misinformation and it’s often easy to tell this based on the source where you’re seeing said misinformation.
This AI garbage doesn’t know it’s garbage and there’s no way to easily tell it’s false unless you happen to spot something egregiously wrong like the things that Torch pointed out in this article. If not for the BMW BRZ and F10 550i truck mentioned in the article, I would think that the article was just written by some low level clickbait article writer.
Hey, sometimes the conspiracy loons get things right! Hang on, the Overlizards are calling…
You know it’s fake because Mason Verger in the brown shoes never leaves the house.
I’ve been doing some AI training for work, and one of the things they discussed in a class was that current AI isn’t going to end the world in a Terminator-esque apocalypse. What’s scary about it is the ability to almost-instantly generate an entire ecosystem of misinformation. You can publish ebooks, astroturf social media, and create so many web sites claiming the sky is green that by normal standards it will seem like you have a strong argument. And given how many people fall for one poorly-written Facebook post, society is not ready for that level of sophistication in misinformation.
Yep, that’s exactly my concern.
Even a well crafted word salad is…still word salad.
Even if the content was accurate, what’s the point? Why do I need to know to avoid the PT Cruiser? If it had stuck to new cars, mmmmmaybe it might be interesting.
I find myself confused by the current definition we are using for AI, as you point out, it’s just a scrapping tool, there is 0 actual intelligence going on, artificial or otherwise. Doesn’t mean it isn’t impressive technology, just that per usual the tech companies are overestimating it’s capabilities.
If you ask me, the only thing impressive about the technology is how much useless crap it generates.
I had a friend in college who trained her parakeet to whistle the first few bars of the “Andy Griffith Show” theme. She then tried to teach it the “Flintstones” theme. It wound up getting a bit lost and coming up with something in between the two. To me, AI is that poor confused budgie.
No stock options for Shooting Brake, who is clearly not an MBA!
Haha, you couldn’t be more right about that!
Yeah, I hate the use of “AI” for what’s essentially a predictive-text chatbot. There’s an algorithm involved, sure, but it’s not frickin’ intelligent. Stop calling it intelligent! It’s no more intelligent than pond scum or Jim Spanfeller.
Yeah, I call it Artificial Stupidity (I’ll never get sick of saying that)
Also, that Skynet is coming for us all!
It’s more properly called machine learning, but that doesn’t have the cultural cachet of artificial intelligence so the marketing department won’t go near it.
Kinda fun (in the not so fun way) as a high school English teacher in the age of Chat GPT. Frequent conversations that look like this, “Either you used Chat GPT, which is academic dishonesty OR you write like an uninformed robot–neither of these is good.”
I honestly think the best way to teach students not to lazily use AI is to make them heavily revise the shitty work AI produces for them. I’m also not 100% against AI as a product, so I ‘ve walked students through what it would take to guide an AI towards actually writing something that is quality–inputing the evidence and the points to be made, uploading your own writing so that it can match your style, repeatedly generating work and then asking for specific revisions, etc. Usually, the student’s response is just, “It sound easier to just writte it.”
Writte it? You almost had me AI?
You know, Connors is a name that can reasonably be associated with AI. Usually combatting it, but that only makes it a better cover…
Is this T1000?
You raise A very good point. It also makes me think were either the reddit post or this article published on March 32nd?
The name is Connor. As in “The Connor Family” minus Roseanne.
This AI “mistake” resulted in the deaths of several thousand people.
And it’s not a tumor. Neighbah.
Trivia I only found out recently. In James Cameron’s T2, John Connor’s step mom is played by the same woman who played the epic badass marine Vasquez in James Cameron’s Aliens.
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001280/
“Hey Vasquez, ever been mistaken for a man?”
“No, have you?”
Had a co-worker use AI to write a control plan for manufacturing quality. She asked me to review it – and it meant nothing and would have accomplished nothing. Just a collection of buzz words, although in honesty, if someone had no concept of what a control plan is supposed to be they probably would have thought it was OK. At least the grammar and sentence structure was reasonably readable.
Amazing how even the most sterile of content still needs both emotion AND human reasoning put into it to not seem like a simulation of itself, as it happens when AI tries to write longer pieces. There’s other areas where AI still feels super weird no matter how much better it’s gotten, like speech generation; it’s gotten to a point where I can spot it – and become off-put by it – within seconds of the start of a video, way before the AI voice model first struggles with numbers, dates or acronyms (which I actually chalk up more to user error, you can get around those errors with better textual input – writing “twenty twenty” if you don’t want the AI to say “two-zero-two-zero”, for instance). Much like with image generation, here’s a distinct artificial feel to it that we’ll evolve to spot along with the evolution of the models themselves. Maybe AI will get there eventually, but I think it’ll be way harder and take longer than people currently believe.
Even when AI is deployed in a more bare-bones way, such as an AI algorithm sorting data, you still have fundamental challenges to overcome – I know this because I actually work fixing the mistakes made by an “AI” data extraction algorithm. Me and my colleagues see AI malfunctioning on a daily basis and it’s super funny, because we’re basically operators of a Mechanical Turk, marvelling our clients with the wonders of some shitty software.
Hear this statement a while ago: AI is just three labor violantions wearing a trenchcoat.
I genuinely burst out laughing, that is an excellent one-liner 😀
This is a GOOD thing: I should be able to pick up a BMW BRZ super-cheap now!
Since you can get a BMW Supra, the BRZ was only a matter of time.
“Artificial Ignorance system that we employ to get just that special je ne sais quoi in every post we write”
I’d say it gives your posts more of a je ne sais rien quality..
While we can all have a laugh at the “current state” of AI, I heard a frightening interview on the “offline” podcast that this is consumer AI, “golf cart” AI in car terms. The AI in the development labs, the “Lucid Air” AI, that one is scary and should not be released.
Shhhhh. Don’t tell Elon.
I was waiting to see DANGER TO MANIFOLD, but it didn’t quite get there. Disappointing.
Utopian sci-fi: Artificial intelligence and automation will take over the jobs people don’t really want to do and free them to engage in philosophy and art. We’ll live in a post-scarcity society where no one needs to worry about their basic needs.
Current reality: Hey, we’re going to have these algorithms create art and write informative opinion pieces. They’re not going to be good at it, but we’ll put them everywhere we can to reduce the writing and illustrating jobs and pay people less. Also, basic necessities are going to get more expensive.
Have you checked what jobs in Philosophy and Arts pay? Can’t get cheaper than self publishing right?
Darn! I was sure the ignorance on The Autopian was real.
I’m pretty sure the ignorance we readers bring to the comment section is both authentic and organic, so just jump into the comments for the real thing.
Already wet.
If AI can’t even figure out all the BMW chassis codes, what hope do the rest of us have?
There was a slim chance when they were all Exx. but once other letters became involved, there was no hope.
I might be mistaken, but I have found the web to have always been full of insipid, inaccurate garbage. TV is also bad with pandering to whomever gives them ratings. The shocking thing for me is that there are so many people who don’t exercise critical thinking when absorbing the garbage. AI is the noob who posts stuff in a car forum and gets flamed for not utilizing the search tool first.
Was that a shot at me? LOL
I hate this timeline.
Or this version of the Matrix
I used to—then I read more history.
It could be worse. Way worse
This is The Bad Place!
Great reference to a great show.
Where did that bad AI touch you? Show me on this Atari keyboard.