I’ll be honest: there are times that crappy AI-generated artwork is a gift — a beautiful blessing to humanity, and this is one of those times. I think AI image generating systems can make a good tool in the arsenal of a designer, but I do not believe it can replace a designer, at least not for contexts were producing work that isn’t completely idiotic is a priority. If you don’t believe me, then I think this illustration from a Temu trailer hitch receiver ad will explain my point beautifully.
I really can’t get over how incredibly, astoundingly good this is. There’s simply no better demonstration of how AI is not actually “intelligence” as we understand it; it’s capable of some incredible results, but the truth is that any AI system has no idea of what its actually doing, because it is not self-aware in any way. It’s an algorithm running on a power-hungry computer, a complex series of conditionals being fed an astounding number of relevant references and making probability-based decisions.
That’s not the same as thinking, and that’s why when we ask it to make images for trailer hitch receivers, we get things like this:
I know Temu isn’t well known for its quality control, but you’d think someone would check the AI slop images before posting them ????
That said it does look like something that might come out of one of @the_autopian ‘s late night Cheetos-fuelled creative sessions ???? pic.twitter.com/0bZ9JILZoK
— Tim Oldland (@Tim_Oldland) May 5, 2025
Our man Tim there was the one who brought this to my attention via that tweet, and then I had to find the ad myself just to be sure it was real, and, yes, thankfully, it was:
Holy shit. This is astounding. It appears that whatever image-generating AI algorithm Temu uses took a baseline image of the Hitch Adapter Receiver Extension and, perhaps getting confused by keywords like trailer or camper or RV or something like that, turned that image of a hitch receiver into a whole camper/RV of its own.
Look, you can even see the base image the AI must have started from:
…and then what it became:
My god, it’s so good. Let’s look at a little animation of this, why not?
The camper-like thing it conjured out of the silicon aether is pretty incredible, really. It looks like a gyro-stabilized modified motorcycle-style camper, and I imagine those big flip-down J-shaped metal arms would be used to keep it stable when it’s parked, kind of like this:
That’s my quick sketch of what I think this may look like from a front-quarter view, with the stabilizing arm flipped down. It’s got an upper sleeping berth and a main living area below, I imagine. Our own daydreaming designer, The Bishop, did a quick sketch of what he thinks the internal arrangement of such a vehicle might be like:
I think it makes for a pretty cool two-wheeled, gyro-stabilized RV! And I’ll be honest, I think of myself as a pretty creative person, but I’m not sure I’d have thought to consider what sort of RV a tow hitch receiver could become, and I owe this wonderfully artificial intelligence a lot of admiration for pulling off something so wonderful and inane.
This is the sort of thing that would never happen with a human designer, because humans, crucially, know what things are. AI has no idea what anything is, and while that’s usually results in disaster or at least dismay, in this case, the unfeeling, unknowing hand of electronic fate has thrown us something truly bonkers, and for that I am thankful.
This is perfect example of the copyright issues with AI too. It straight up ripped off the source image. Sure, it added some nonsense around it, but the recognizable part of the image is a direct copy.
I’m being completely serious right here: I am so glad that you and Bishop believe in this site enough to write an article about and mock up drawings of a Temu hitch receiver camper would. Thank you for this belly-buster of an article.
The ultimate AI image was made a few years ago. They should have shut it down after this was made:
https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/x4jd00/bobbarian_ross_the_trees_are_unhappy/
I do understand why people are hating on AI and laugh at the creative efforts it makes. I’ve also seen people use it to make performance reviews read better, and I feel like that’s cheating. An annual Christmas display near us uses background art that is clearly AI – how many fingers does Santa really need?
However, it excels in pattern recognition and that has made a huge difference in data analysis. I often see articles about how it revealed archeological finds in LIDAR data, and less often have seen some results in astronomy as well. I think it can be a useful tool once we figure out where it actually fits in.
That’s the overall challenge that people need to understand. But once again if you are a kid and have a hammer everything is a nail.
AI image generation is actually an offshoot of the image-recognition programs. If you ask one to draw you (eg) a red car, it will create a bunch of random colours and feed that to an image recogniser and ask if it matches “red car”. If not, it randomises the image some more and tries again. A few million rounds of that and you have an image of something that looks enough like a red car that the AI ‘recognises’ it as such and you’re done.
(It’s a bit more complicated than that, but you get the idea)
I use AI in my job to sort batches of hundreds of images into general categories, and it works perfectly fine for that. Like you said it is really good with recognizing patterns and summing up huge blocks of text, but that’s the extent of its usefulness, IMO.
In my neighborhood there was only one vacant lot that remained after the neighborhood was fully developed and then second-developed as people sold off half their lots up to the zoning limits, This was because the lot is a narrow triangle, bordered by two nearly parallel streets. The lot stood unoccupied for 50-60 years until finally someone built a ridiculously narrow house on it.
Those people need to own this RV.
“I think AI image generating systems can make a good tool in the arsenal of a designer”
Eh, given that so much of AI is derived from scraping the work of actual designers & artists (in other words, stealing the work of creatives) & is so damn resource-hungry (gobble-gobble) I’d argue that no designer (& artist & indeed anyone) worth their salt who actually gives a damn about the environment and about creatives getting (& keeping) proper credit & compensation would ever willingly use AI. Good grief.
I’m not current with the times, but this is a direct result of what used to be called “keyword spamming”, where a seller puts every possible search term in the item’s title for the ultimate SEO. Then somebody fed this word salad into AI and the result is no surprise. But it’s not just Temu or Ali that does it, it’s everywhere.
I wouldn’t be so sure about that:
50+ Cake Fails That Are Basically Internet Legends At This Point
I know a former design engineer who, after a five year degree, a year of experience, and a one hour meeting to explain the design brief, once designed a pair of machined casings to bolt to a bench, with the split line between the casings at a few degrees off 90 degrees, but in opposite directions.
The two halves wouldn’t bolt together, and even if they did the mounts on the bottom wouldn’t bolt to a flat plane. The bolt holes didn’t line up with anything.
The faces weren’t even out by a round number of degrees, they were both different random numbers to three decimal places.
He also habitually put dimensions on drawings that were off the printable area, and the wrong side of the drawing border.
Not one clue about what he was supposed to do, and increasingly furious when you tried to explain what a drawing was, and what it was for.
In the end he became just a very expensive way of stopping one of our chairs being stolen during work hours.
When I was a young industrial electrician, I had a mechanical engineer design a circuit I knew was wrong, but there was no way I was telling the smug SOB. When, as predicted, a fire was produced the following conversation occurred:
me: oh look there is your problem (pointing to the smoking dead short)
him: why did you wire it that way.
me: (pointing at drawing)that’s what you told me to do.
him: but you knew what I meant!
me: hey, I’m not the electrical engineer
him: neither am I!!
me: so maybe don’t design circuits anymore?
I was a big believer in the run to fail method with coworkers
Hell, I’d camp that.
Also. I find it beyond ironic that the notoriously scammy site Temu finds it necessary to bar me with a picture lest I be a bot
Everyboty needs someboty
Everyboty needs someboty to love
Hey, you…watch this new “trailer” for this new movie coming out to a theater near you!
Coming soon: Bring A Trailer 2!
I can’t wait til the next camper article written by Mercedes:
“I finally found the cheapest RV ever- check out this Temu motorhome! Camp like a billionaire! Bring a trailer (or 2!)”
Maybe its got two wheels up front like a Morgan 3 wheeler. Its amazing AI would come up with this at all. What camper uses a single rear wheel that it could reference? Also what size wrench would be needed on the nut on the side if this vehicle was sized for a human to drive?
Shut up and take my money!
But, seriously, this is a great example of why we shouldn’t use AI. Like, at all. No, I will not be taking questions or debating at this time.
No questions, no debate, just full and unconditional agreement from me.
I told my friend that, no, I wasn’t using ChatGPT and had no plans to. He told me to get with the times at which point I went outside and yelled at the clouds. And felt good about it.
I work with a guy who just got a promotion after asking AI to write a letter justifying his promotion.
I’m furious that it worked, but that working hard and filling in HR forms achieves nothing.
The only AI I see fit to use is my Actual Imagination
I have PDF’s I needed converted to Word, ideally while retaining the formatting to make life easy. They were large files and Adobe wasn’t getting the job done.
Asked ChatGPT to do it and the first attempt put
every
single
word
on it’s own line. I asked why the formatting sucks and it said “oh I can do a better job, it just takes longer, want me to do that?”
Fucking duh. The output looked great at first glance, but then I realized it decided to just summarize paragraphs as it saw fit instead of transcribing.
So yea, AI is still horseshit.
Imagine making something so bad that manually using cntl-c/cntl-v on individual files is preferable.
Also why is Adobe so shit at it anyway? Because it definitely IS even though it should be relatively straightforward.
How many did Mercedes order?
It’s the mashup we’ve been craving: Tochinsky’s cheap-ass Chinese vehicle and Mercedes’ love of RVs.
It’s the motorcyclehometowrig the market demands.
LOL
I’m in architecture, and there are days that I worry that AI could one day take my job. But when you think about how actually mindless AI is, nah, I’m safe.
I do think certain professions are toast in the next few years. Paralegals? Graphic designers? Poof.
Yeah those of us in the civil engineering field aren’t too worried either.
I don’t see field inspection of construction projects being threatened. Or construction projects at all.
I can see a day when we 3D print buildings on a perfect foundation. But the sitework, in the dirt? No way AI is gonna figure that out.
As someone married to a graphic designer, your assumption that AI will take over that trade is without merit. Much like the trailer hitch attempt, AI just cannot understand what someone is actually asking for, and it can’t incrementally modify something to meet a clients needs. Most humans can’t. In fact, my wife has had countless clients come to her after having other “designers” use AI and it is always hilarious. Several times she has seen where AI ‘almost’ got it right, and the image just needed a tweak, but when prompted, the model completely regenerated the image into something unrecognizable. AI could give a nice starting point or be used to generate a bunch of baseline samples, but it will be a while before the graphic design industry is truly challenged.
Any creative professional relying on AI to do their job for them should quit the business, if customers are paying you to actually do work for them, you should do the work
Applies to lawyers, too.
I try to avoid absolutes where possible, but I understand where you are coming from. Most customers, however, aren’t ‘paying you to actually do work for them’, they are paying for a result. My clients (finance), and hers (design) couldn’t care less about what tools are used, how much time something takes, or any frustrations along the way – they care about the final result. Of course, using AI can be beneficial or detrimental to that final result, but that risk is up to the user.
There are cases pending in which lawyers won’t >have< to quit as they are losing their bar licenses for submitting AI briefs in which precedent is fictitious.
That’s some real-ass fafo right there!
From what I’ve heard, song writers and voice artists will have a rough time. Those whose work is being imitated might have grounds for a lawsuit.
Especially the ones in Nashville doing pop-country, surprised they haven’t been made redundant already
I wanted to see what AI would do with our organization’s logo, not expecting much, but at least that it would be “good enough.” Yeah, I wouldn’t worry too much about the humans getting replaced any time soon.
My wife works for an interior design company. All of the “artwork” they hang on walls is now AI generated, rather than created by a human.
It means that instead of spending hours going through catalogues trying to find an image of the right subject in the right colours to suit a scheme they can spend ten minutes asking AI to create something new.
We have one in our house. I liked it until I heard it was AI.
Paralegals, no. A lot of what they do is very granular stuff that requires citation and very specific knowledge that AI fails at. Which isn’t to say some don’t try, but it’s a short trip to getting fired.
Graphic designers? No, AI graphic design is usually pretty broken and it can’t do a lot of stuff reliably. Plus it’s very bad at iterating, one of the most important skills for design.
However, you know that level of middle management where they just call meetings and have meetings and all of those meetings could be emails? AI boosters are really pushing to get AI attend meetings and then summarizing those meetings.
I work for a law firm and in addition to their primary functions, the paralegals perform a lot of other secondary functions, too, including nagging me about approaching deadlines. We also have autogenerated reminders, but those are just too easy to ignore. At least for me, ignoring an actual person trying to do their job is a lot harder than ignoring a piece of software.
AI: “You knew I always wanted to pretend to be an architect!”
This is a f A I l.
I have “mandatory AI training” at work next week. I’ll be sure to bring this up 😉
Looking at The Bishop’s drawings, are we resting our feet on top of the sink?
I did a drawing too quick. There would be a fold-up cover over the area you stand in to allow for a full-length sleeping area. Additionally, you could fold this flip-up back even further to access the sink below.
Cook/bathe? Can you cook in the shower? I hope David doesn’t see that, he may relapse!
I was just informed that, for the past year or more, I have been pronouncing the two Chinesium websites as “TAY-moo” and “Shine” (instead of “teemoo” and “sheen”)
But despite my phonetically much more reasonable guesses, I’m apparently “out of it.” I used to be with it, then they changed what “it” is.
I’ve been informed of the same situation many times in the past. I was again reminded recently that “it” had changed. I gave my usual reply of “shrug”.
I had Temu correct, only because I’m not always fast enough with the skip or mute button when that “shopping like a billionaire” crap comes on
Ever since I first cut the cable in 2008, I’ve slowly found myself less able to pronounce common things because I simply never hear them spoken out loud.
That’s a lot less of an issue now since almost all streaming services have ads again 🙂
Yeah, that’s kind of how people forgot how to pronounce Pall Mall
Wait. There is a way to say that brand that isn’t how it looks? Pale Male?
The cigarettes are supposed to be “pell mell”, like the game
I always thought they were named after the walking/shopping street Pall Mall in London, perhaps by way of Pall Mall, Tennessee (which was named after the above named street in London).
It’s originally a British brand, was named after the Mall in London, which, in turn, is named after the lawn game that used to be played there
Who is that, one of those influencers?
I remember when I first smoked as a teen (because in the mid-90s, we all did) and occasionally struggled to say “Marlboro” with any conviction. So I’d usually get carded and that’s why we ended up going to the bowling alley cigarette machines with a handful of quarters.
What were we talking about?
Oh, that happened to a coworker, he was just barely 21, bunch of us went out to a bar one night and he ordered a Blue Moon, but said it in a weirdly suspicious sounding way, just strange intonation, and got carded immediately, but the British guy who was with us, and who actually was underage by US laws, was not
Actually, the only time that guy was ever carded at all during the entire time he was with us as part of an exchange/training arrangement, the bartender stared at his UK ID very intensely for an extended period of time, then handed it back, told him he hoped he was enjoying his time in our country and served him anyway. We assumed maybe the birth date formate confused him or something and he was too embarrassed to say anything
After tariffs you’ll need to be a billionaire to shop there.
Now what “it” is, is scary.
AI is just getting stupid and lazy. It is entering it teenage years.
This is what we get as a result of people using it for LinkedIn headshots