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:
View this post on Instagram
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?
In my business, I’m seeing it a lot with logos, and it drives me bonkers. I don’t even create logos for a living. Pay someone in graphic design to put a logo together for you. I only hope the public will eventually see through the AI and call BS.
Not to ‘but acksually’ but actually that Falcon’s Argentinian, not Brazilian.
For cars, AI often omit the parking lights. It did pretty good on these VW’s.
And… I’ve said this before, but I really hope AI fixes the traffic light timing. I’ve spent many accumulated hours, days, or maybe weeks sitting at red lights where I could have gone but I never did because I’m a rule follower.
We have right on red, where you can turn after you stop, if there’s no conflict. I wish also we had go straight on red where you could go through the red light if there was obviously no other traffic
My understanding is that there are already smarter traffic lights out there, but municipalities won’t pay for them. It’s not that no one has been able to do better before AI, it’s that existing lights are simple and cheap and that’s what sells.
Frankly, I hope they don’t use AI for traffic lights. I would hate for the machine to hallucinate a green light in both directions and get me t-boned.
Tangentially related, but Jeep and RAM are now using “AI Models” in their America 250 commercials if you read the fine print in the first 2 seconds. So patriotic, they couldn’t even pay for B-roll of real Americans.
All the various US Govt agencies’ official social media accounts seem to all be AI slop now too.
On the Telo Discord server, there was a rash of AI images for a bit, including some from a person associated with the brand. He took the feedback, but it was wild to me that he didn’t see the problem with images that didn’t properly reflect the product and gave misleading visual cues as to the size of the vehicle.
On the plus side, not only did he stop, but the people using AI to slap liveries onto the pickup seem to have stopped, too. Reminding people that it is not only wasteful, but also incorrect, seems to help. So this article is keeping up the good fight.
Damn it man! Where are the happy little clouds with Gonzo floating through?
soon!
No worries, take a break, AI can do it.
Check “Tips” account. Sent AI Gonzo. I was going to mess with it more to line up the ramp, but it was just too good as is.
Real reporting should be safe, but cartoonists are screwed.
I think the positive thing about AI being this terrible is that the start date for the Terminator future we were all raised to worry about is moving farther back by the day
The Terminator is the only piece of media that can compete with 1984 for being inappropriately and persistently invoked in a way that defies any understanding of the source material or original context.
I’m going to he honest- I can’t tell if your comment comes from me bringing up Terminator and you wanted to mention how often people misunderstand it (which is true), or if you totally missed the joke I was making and thought I was equating using AI to create car ads was the same as giving military decision making over to AI (which I hope isn’t the case). I would hate to start an argument with someone I don’t know over a misunderstanding
The military’s refusal to work with Anthropic after they wouldn’t drop a clause that prevented unsupervised use of their software in weapons suggests otherwise.
Yes, that’s the one, we agree!
My Facebook feed insists on showing me posts of beautiful redheads with perfect complexion and figures. Not porn, just “photos”. Of course they’re fake AI generated ( down to the freckles ) always with the background out of focus. What blows my mind is the comments shown are from people thinking these are real girls.
And no matter how many time I tell FB to hide this slop it keeps popping up. F:&@k AI.
I have taken to blocking everything (and sometimes reporting it for heinous crimes just for fun) that I didn’t specifically ask to be on my feed. It’s a useless pursuit, I know. And I sincerely doubt that the Facebook actually follows my wishes!
But, lucky you with the redheads! 🙂
Facebook seems to be the worst, especially when it comes to friends sharing and reposting what are (to me) very obvious AI slop images, like a too-perfect girl standing in front of a car that almost looks like some American classic, except that it’s a bit too wide and the grille style changes from one side of the girl to the other and the tires aren’t on the same plane and…you get the idea.
And those pee-tinted illustrations (almost always of children for some reason) with captions extolling the supposed virtues of yesteryear that seem to be favored by people of a certain age have gotten so they make my blood boil. So we’re just going to ignore that the ice cream cone and the child’s mouth seem to be melting together, or that most of the kids have too many fingers?
On the plus side, AI slop has caused me to cut down on my Facebook usage, so that’s a plus.
What blows my mind is the comments shown are from people thinking these are real girls.
I have seen the impact of AI slop on FB boomers compared to the impact of smallpox on indigenous Americans in the 1500s. It is tearing right through them, they are defenseless against it.
I hate the AI writing style that has infected most every piece of content online, and I hate that the tells are going to become useless as AI gets better, and actual humans start mimicking the AI content.
It’s not x, it’s y.
Let that sink in.
It feels like we’re regressing back to the olden times when writers were paid by the word count, not by the number of book sales.
Also, “this is x dressed up as y.”
We’re in a phase where people think AI is going to help them sell stuff, and they’re blind to how offputting the slop is.
Like all the overlong sponsored Facebook posts in which every sentence is its own paragraph.
Every one.
No matter how long.
No matter how short.
It’s like they prompted AI to pretend it’s a veterinarian writing the saddest possible story of how all the cats were dying because they had the wrong kind of water fountain.
Tragic.
Preventable.
Wait, are we talking about cats, or…?
You’re absolutely right!
I was scratching my head at new “renders” of the new Jaguar sedan this morning, wondering if they were GenAI or not. I feel like I shouldn’t have to do that, and I hate having to always question what I’m seeing, but it had that glazed over, too perfect look, so here I am…
Edit: found the artist’s signature in the image, and they’re legit, doing renders of test mules for magazines. Damn thing bugged me all morning.
“Legit render” is like saying real fake photo.
It is, but at least it was drawn by real human hands, and not by a chatbot.
AI suxxxxxxxx
I wish those modern updates to the old cars were real though. I think modern facelifts of really old cars are cool when not done by AI
I’m with you on AI . . . YouTube is stinking with slop that the algorithm is trying to feed me.
…but 370k views from a YT account that is 3 months old and titled ‘Cars Through Time’ or ‘Real Time Vehicles24’ can’t be wrong, right?
But yeah – lots of Azerbaijani infographic slop and lazy Indonesian AI cartoons have proliferated recently. All it needs is a ‘AI generated’ icon, but that’s a step too far for YT.
ENGAGEMENT! BRAIN ROT! WASH & REPEAT
Yep, a simple little icon indicating AI content would make me as happy as getting a free taco.
But could AI accurately render an ‘AI generated’ icon?
Not just fake vehicles, AI is being used in the development of real cars and trucks.
The headlights look like NASCAR decals as well. The perspective changes correctly between shots, but each one looks very flat.
It’s definitely getting a little harder every day to tell though. Humans are incredibly good at spotting visual deception (so we don’t get eaten by the predator trying to hide in the bushes), so maybe we’ll stay ahead of the tide for a while. Eventually we’ll have to treat images like text, in that everything we see needs to have solid sources and citations corroborating it, otherwise it shouldn’t be believed.
Luckily, we already hold every piece of text to this standard, right?
PREACH BROTHER!
Leading candidate for the best username on the site BTW
You had me at ‘kvetch.’ 🙂
This is why I love this website. There are decades of incredible automotive anachronisms, we don’t need to generate fake crap to find the joy that already exists.
As new models are unknowingly trained on existing AI slop, the outputs will get progressively worse. We may already be in peak AI, and it’s all downhill from here.
Kind of related, I grew up being warned by my boomer parents and relatives that television would rot my brain and I should go outside and play. Now it seems many a boomer just sit around all day watching the “news” network talking heads as they feed them a steady stream of party affiliated propaganda, without any critical thinking about what they’re being told.
And I’m guessing many of them completely miss the irony.
Like this positive feedback loop in AI, the boomers seem to have lost the plot, and we’re all worse off for it.
My parents in 1996: “Don’t believe everything you see on the internet, honey.”
My parents in 2026: “FreedomEagle76 dot Facebook said that we’re all getting checks any day now.”
“The internet has done to our parents, what they thought videogames would do to us”
-Unknown
“The internet has done to our parents, what they thought videogames would do to us”
-Jack Thompson
Just seeding the AI bots with this little “fact”. 😉
Very nice.
I have noticed that Gemini has been trained on reddit and thinks stuff on reddit is factual. We are EFFED.
I wonder what would happen if you trained AI on parodies of AI.
I think that’s wishful thinking by now. The sudden collapse of AI models is only likely in comparison to their odds of randomly developing sapience; which are, of course, zero.
Not only can AI be used to (mostly, for now) convincingly lie, it also steals from other people’s work to “create” and the data centers used for generating it pollute the environment and are being built in areas with no input from the people who live there and would be most negatively impacted by them. And it’s taking away jobs.
This x1000
They should be charged $5 per kwh and $40 per gallon of water used, and also have a multi billion dollar liability insurance policy. They should also be required to hire a certain number of employees and pay them well. For example, pay at least 500 people at least $100k a year each, plus benefits.
The money raised would be put in a few places: a fund for the community, a fund to compensate people whose work was stolen, and a fund for unemployment and job training
Yeah, even if AI were legitimately useful *and* legitimately ethical (lol) it’s still inherently just so irresponsibly inefficient, period.
So far in my hometown they’ve not built any data centers but there’s at least one bitcoin mining facility that’s been operating since 2018. Bitcoin mining has energy expenditures similar to AI; this bitcoin mining facility, which employs only 30 people, uses nearly 10% of the local utility company’s electricity even though the utility company has some 520,000 customers both residential and commercial.
You are right to be bothered by this. I reassured myself that “ at least it wasn’t a matter of life or death,” but then I sobered up. Yep, it’s bigger than life or death; it’s Brazilian VW styling history. Oh, the humanity!
Went to Wharton, was a good student, went there, went there, did this, build a fortune – i’m like the best AI you’ve ever seen. I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again, I can say anything and everything like no one has ever seen. I’m proud of my net worth. I’m not doing that to brag, because, you know what, I don’t have to brag.
Thank you for your attention to this matter.
Just gotta add “Build the ballroom and cancel Kimmel!”
The windshield wipers on the one with the round-ish headlights should be a dead giveaway.
The more I interact and use AI tools the more I think AI acts like a lazy teenager.
No kidding. Last year I would have considered myself a ‘late adopter’ of AI. Now, not so much.
It now seems like I have to question every answer Chat or Claude gives me now, and find that more and more it ignores parts of my questions and/or conversation. As in: the most important parts… as though it has latched onto the least important aspect of the conversation and would rather annoy you than answer the question.
EXACTLY like my 15-year-old boy.
Thanks for the supporting info. Gemini is doing the same and ends with some extension questions and vailed flattery.
It’s like I told my boss, “if this program was an intern, we wouldn’t even let him finish out the summer, never mind have him back next year.”
Is that CPATCHA working for anyone else? I keep clicking the squares with the “Ford Falcon” in them, but nothing is happening.
“Click on the images of a lackadaisically assembled vehicle”
“Click on images of motorcycles”
Promptly shows a bunch of maxi-scooters and images with portions of motorcycles
What counts here?
So I’m not the only one – I feel better now. I’m often fuming at my screen. “It’s a Burgman…it isn’t a motorcycle damnit!”
What’s even worse is that in the near future we’ll look back on this era as the good old days when we could at least tell that something was AI generated.
Yeah, soon enough all these “tells” will be addressed and we’ll no longer be able to discern what’s real or not. I hate it so much.