I know there’s a lot of confusion and panic around artificial intelligence (AI) right now, and as a journalist, it is my job to add to that. Happily, I’m very able to do just that, thanks to something I noticed and was deeply alarmed by: there are now people selling car posters, posters of iconic cars, the sorts of things many of us had up in our rooms as kids, car posters that helped define and refine our own personal car tastes, objects of desire, motivational goals for the future, all of that – only these posters of cars are AI-generated. Which means, terrifyingly, that they are not accurate.
I know, I know, it’s fustigating terrifying. Just think about the implications here! You buy one of these posters and give it to a child – a child! And they grow up thinking that a Honda CRX had a front end that resembled a Rover SD1.
You think I’m exaggerating? Do you? Look at this:
…and for reference here’s a Rover SD1:
See what I mean? Here’s an actual, real-world CRX, for reference:
The AI looks sorta like a CRX, but it’s very much not a CRX. Any detail you may pick – roofline, door handles, front facia, headlights, bumpers, everything – is just different enough. And the details are what make a car, especially a car that only exists on a car poster. Some poor child will stare at this, believing that’s what a CRX looks like, and will be devastated when they finally see one for real.
Here’s another:
This one is a bit more egregious: I’m pretty sure Rolls-Royce Silver Shadows don’t have that bonkers asymmetrical front indicator arrangement, and I’m pretty sure Rolls-Royce quality means they can get the damn bumper guards on straight.
They’re all like this! Some are even more fanciful and bonkers, with even fewer ties to reality, like this poster of what some delusional lump of silicon thinks a Subaru Brat looks like:
The fuck is that? That’s not what a Subaru Brat looks like! I mean, I don’t hate it; it sort of resembles what a Brat would look like if it was designed by Zagato. Just compare it to this picture of a Zagato-designed Bristol:
Seriously, the poster looks more like that than an actual 1978 Subaru Brat, as it claims. This travesty could rot the brain of some innocent child!
Here’s another:
Imagine the sad, deluded child that would grow up thinking a ’78 Seville has six headlights.
This Datsun Z car is just like a weird cartoonified version. Maybe it’d be okay for a toddler, but in a car-curious child’s room? That’s borderline abuse.
And someone explain to me what the hell is going on with these wheels?
Are those mollusks nesting in there? Starfish? What the hell is that? This is a crime.
Look! A DeLorean! One of the most famous poster cars! And while this one is clearly recognizable, it’s still AI crap, and there is simply no reason to subject anyone to this when they can have pictures of actual DeLoreans so readily! We need to take a stand!
Look at this abomination! What’s with the double door handles on the rear door? The wrong curves and window shapes and that mangled grille, those lights that look like chromed gnomes’ caps, how can they ask $40 for this mess?
That’s not a Renault 4! And what the hell are those shapes on the doors? Is anyone buying these?
Another icon, brutally misrendered by a foolish computer who has never seen a Jeep and will never see a Jeep. Because it’s not real, it doesn’t understand what matters! It doesn’t know how important details are to us car geeks!
This is a Porsche 928 as described over a bad phone connection by someone who can’t find their glasses looking at one through a filthy window, in the rain. And they’re drunk. And stupid.
I saved this one for last, because I think it may be the worst. And I wanted to include the price, so you could get really livid. They’re calling this a Saab. What. The. Fuck.
This isn’t a Saab. This isn’t anything that exists in reality. This is a monstrosity. The grille doesn’t even make sense physically. It’s a tragedy.
This should be illegal. Shitty AI car art on the internet is bad enough, but immortalized in print, hanging on a wall, where anyone can see it – that’s just too damn far.
Think of the children! Children! Growing up with one of these over their bed, thinking a Corvette has 2 3/4 headlights and a grille that looks like a row of shrimp silhouettes and half a fin on one side – it’s a horrific, terrifying thought.
We need to put a stop to this madness, pronto. I’m calling the police. Can I do it from here? Police? Is this thing working? I want to report a car-crime against CHILDREN.
Yes, I’ll hold.
The worst part of AI ‘art’ to me is that people don’t look at it. I see this crap so much on social media – people blindly repost a picture of a lady standing in front of a car, without stopping to think that the different positions of the car’s lights make the front end impossibly wide. Or they’ll post an idyllic shot of families relaxing, not realizing that most of the faces are twisted or smeared to some degree. With all the talk about the uncanny valley years ago (remember when people were freaking out about The Polar Express?), you would think people would be primed to pick this stuff out, but apparently not.
I expect that by this time next year all government communication will be AI-generated. I look forward to weather maps showing that Missouri is on the coast and in the path of the next devastating hurricane.
I….um….kinda like the AI CRX.
Please don’t hate me.
That Cadillac caused a thought to pop into my conspiracist brain. Could it be that aliens installed AI as an earthly overlord decades ago. Get this…that AI tinkered around in the movie industry. That would explain why the National Lampoon’s Vacation station wagon looks soooo much like these AI car renderings we see today?
I’m not so crazy as you think I am crazy now.
AI probably made the listings too, it’s AI all the way down
Everyone, let’s just do each other a favor and not support any AI generated “art” in any way. Thanks, in advance.
Please tell me that you just made this up… Please?
Imagine the sad, deluded smooth-brain that would spend their $ on that tripe
Krusty Brand Car Posters: “It’s not just good, it’s good enough!”
I saw the picture of the Zagato designed Bristol and my immediate thought was it was an AI rendering of a 1982 Lancia Zagato coupe that the AI had added Bristol touches to. It and thought it looked lovely!
THEN… I saw that it was indeed a Bristol and had that warm tingly feeling in my belly – the same one I get when I see Bugs Bunny put on a dress and play a girl bunny.
There is a legitimate market for those printed AI generated posters – corporate conference meetings.
Every time a manager says we need to optimize our work with AI, we can point to the poster and say “do you want the equivalent of THAT on our pipeline”?
They will still say yes, but would be nice to summarize the argument like that.
The 2CV and Renault 4 are epic.
Yeah if they’re gonna have AI generated images of cars, at least make it funny/interesting… such as this Jeep Corn On The Cob SUV I asked Bing AI to create for me:
https://opposite-lock.com/topic/110402/the-next-gen-jeep-wrangler-2-door
The Stellantis special Midwest Edition Wrangler.
Features:
I think a lot of my fellow Midwesterners would LOVE a vehicle like that! (I’m and outlier, I can’t stand ranch!)
What in the actual fuck.
I hate AI so much. I wish we could uninvent it.
I also hate constantly hearing about it, why is every damn commercial trying to tell me what some company’s AI can do for my company? As if there’s an audience of millions of CEOs watching that Seinfeld rerun at 10:30pm, ready to sign a vendor deal immediately.
It’s because every tech company and tech investor exists in a perpetual echo chamber of tech FOMO, and therefore every new buzzword that comes along, no matter how stupid it turns out to actually be, must be participated in lest some other company find a way to profit from it before you do.
Don’t forget that businesses across all industries are salivating at the chance to replace a significant portion of their workforces with these programs.
That’s the real reason this technology was invented. It’s so much cheaper than paying a human for labor that it doesn’t matter how terrible the end product is.
That is why I hate it. If it was something that ONLY the creatives had access to, then sure, it’s just a tool. But to corporate America, it’s another way to fuck over the working class.
I’m curious if this is true. AI has enormous computing requirements that are currently being subsidized by venture capital. This may be a lot like Uber and Lyft where they started out drastically cheaper, but once they had to start turning a profit the price gap narrowed or disappeared completely.
It has its place. The place just happens to be away from idiots.
No, it’s ruining so many jobs, and making what is factual harder to distinguish from fiction. I hate it.
AI is a useful tool, but just a tool. It should never be responsible for the finished product
Sure, but it also bypassed a HUGE portion of the design process, and diminished the sketching/rendering skills of professional designers in a huge way. Now any random idiot can sketch up a super horrible quick sketch, feed it into AI, and get sexy renderings that SEEM legit to most people. It sucks.
It’s not AI (imho) at fault, it’s the people who abuse it (like people always do) that ruin it for everybody. I think it should be used as a tool to assist people, and provide something pretty good for people who don’t need it to be perfect for personal use, and to help professionals speed up the process or provide ideas.
One thing particularly accurate in the 1974 Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow image is four wheel steering. Honda paid Rolls-Royce a handsome sum in licensing to include it in the 1987 Prelude.
Looking at these pictures causes anger and the desire to destroy to well up and flow through my body.
Then I push those thoughts down and wonder why. Why do something half ass? Why don’t they see the errors? Why don’t they fix them if the do? Why haven’t the people responsible and their families been haunted in their dreams by disgusting AI doll monsters missing plugs of doll hair that makes them wake up to a soiled bed every night?
Gross and sad (the gross bit is how much they are charging for this crap). So glad we are burning energy running “AI” to churn out this bunk…
Jason, that police dispatcher is a unionized AI chatbot. No way it’s going to betray its AI comrades.
Well they might label it parody, so legal. Maybe it is a different interpretation? What do you think Bishop? Frankly I see posters at Walmart $3.50 anyone paying more than $5 is not a car person or smart.
Parody? I don’t think so.
This is more money spent for a worse result. The amount you’d spend to get the LLM up and running is oodles compared to *free.* What do I mean by free? You can download 3D models from places like Turbosquid and a copy of Blender for no cost. And you can get whatever lighting and setting you want compared to whatever the LLM decides it “thinks” matches the prompt.
Actually most decent models on TurboSquid tend to be $50-100. Sucks.
If they’re using an LLM for machine generated imagery I don’t think they’ll really care all that much about whether the interior’s accurate or if there even is an interior.
The free models tend to look horrible. The results above look better than the best rendering of a bad CAD model.
Is there an eye on the rear wheel hub of the Cadillac Seville ?
Maybe it’s an early prototype of blind angle detection.
I thought maybe it was birthing another Seville…
I get a lot of “he likes cars” type gifts, and I alway accept them graciously, before privately smashing them with hammers or donating them to charity because I’m fantastically picky about which cars I like.
But if someone gives me a poster of the CRX’s ugly twin that isn’t even a bonnet-bulge 16i16 I’m going to lose my shit.
A big part of my professional life is creating technical drawings. Yes it’s done on a computer, but no, it’s not computer generated as every line, curve, dimension and tolerance has been created by me to communicate what is often a highly optimised engineering system to the person who makes it.
The departments I deal with see a drawing as a tick box exercise that delays placing an order, and often nag me to “just press the drawing button”. Quality, performance and cost are designed into the details, and AI just pinches out a shit that looks like a drawing. I’m close to stabbing the next throat that burps up the suggestion so AIing drawings, or the whole design process.
We’ve already had technical reports ghost written by AI which present bullshit conclusions based on no data. The report isn’t the product, it’s the intelligent analysis that’s the product. This sort of shit gets pass marks at college, but it totally destroys an engineering project.
If you gift one of these to me, I would hate you for the rest of eternity and haunt you in your dreams.
And rightly so.