I Want To Kvetch About What I Hate About AI When It Comes To Car Stuff

I don’t think anything I’m going to say here is going to be particularly shocking or Earth-shattering to anyone, but I’m sort of frustrated and feel like saying it, and I have to do a Cold Start anyway, so I may as well put it out here: AI is making my job harder. I know that’s the opposite of what the conventional wisdom may be, but for those of us who give a brace of BMs about, you know, things that actually exist, AI is a plague.

Though, to be honest, the more I think about it, it’s not that AI itself is the plague; like all problems, it comes back to us humans. AI is just a tool, for better or worse. It’s the way humans are using AI that’s the real issue. I’ll explain.

I’m bringing this up because of an Instagram post I happened to see that caught my attention like a cat grabbing a dropped piece of sashimi. It was a post that was seemingly designed in a lab to get my attention: it was about a Brazilian Volkswagen, specifically a plan to update the Type 2 Bus in the late 1990s in an attempt to keep it competitive. Here’s the post:

 

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On the surface, it’s a fascinating concept, and one that feels extremely plausible. Brazil overall has a long history of taking deeply obsolete designs and grafting on more modern faces and other details in objectively hilarious ways to try and drag old cars into the present, like what they did with the Ford Falcon (crap, as a commenter mentioned, this is Argentinian, not Brazilian, but the basic point still stands):

And Volkswagen Brazil certainly had plenty of experience modernizing VW hardware that traces back to the 1930s; take what they did with the Beetle chassis and drivetrain to transform it into a far more modern-seeming vehicle like the Brasilia:

So, the idea itself is certainly plausible. And VW absolutely did undertake styling studies to explore how the Type 2 Microbus design could be updated at various times; look at these, for example:

This concept was known as “Heckmotor mit Lufteinlässen an der Front,” which just means it has an engine in back and sucks in air at the front. It seems to be a mid-’60s design study. The compartment at the front – presumably for the spare wheel – is interesting, too.

This 1975 update clearly prefigures the Vanagon-type design that the Type 2 would become. I show you these because it just reinforces that what this AI-generated post is something that is, fundamentally, possible.

So, when I first saw the post, I was excited; a 1997 project to update the old buses that Brazil was still producing? I’m fascinated; this is catnip.

And they look like something VW Brazil may have done: just the front clip was modified, with new faces that incorporated more modern lighting equipment and a bonded-type windshield – as opposed to the old held-in-with-rubber-grommet style – that a ’90s car would have. They seem plausible!

But then I looked closer, and saw the expected AI tells in the small text and logos:

Yep, that’s AI. What about the other one?

Crap. AI, too.

And the interior: this looks like what I would imagine a modernization attempt to the Type 2 interior would, in fact, look like:

Honestly, thank every deity for AI still being bad with text and logos, because those are still the quickest signs of AI bullshit.

It’s all very well done, and that’s the problem. Well, it’s a problem because nothing in the caption suggests it’s AI at all. Now, I am all for making shit up – I love “what-if”-type speculation, and we do a ton of that here on this site – I’ve done it before, and you’ve seen the great stuff The Bishop does here. But we always make it clear it’s fiction, we’re speculating and extrapolating and imagining. That’s fun.

Putting stuff out without the clarification that it’s AI is simply deceptive. It muddies the water of truth and fiction, and that’s just going to bite us in the ass. It already is.

It’s not AI’s fault that it’s weirdly good at creating hypothetical cars like this; the fault is how we use it, and that it’s being used to deceive instead of inform or entertain or spark thought. I hate that when I see anything online now that looks interesting, there’s that seed of doubt that all too often proves to be accurate. It used to be fun to stumble upon something you didn’t know before online, and now, well, who the hell knows what’s real or not.

Being real still matters. It always will. We will never use AI to deceive like this; when I want to deceive, I’ll do it by hand, like our ancestors did.

Stupid AI. I wanted these weird bus concepts to be real.

UPDATE: So, good news – as a commenter pointed out these concepts are real! You can see the actual images on this page! AI was used to extrapolate the partial images into entire vehicles, and the interior shot was AI-upscaled, or something. So why couldn’t the Instagram poster have mentioned that? The AI issue is still valid, because the images still aren’t real, but at least they come from some germ of a real source. Why is everything so hard?