Rest Assured, We Will Never AI Slop You (On Purpose)

If your memory stretches all the way back to three days ago, you’ll recall that Brian had a story about the efficacy of banning lead in gasoline. It’s an interesting story, and if you haven’t read it yet, go ahead and click that hyperlink or just click on the image below.

Indeed, it’s the image that we’re here to discuss, as it was flagged in the comments as generative AI (or “AI junk”) – and that’s a thing we don’t do here. Except for a little, but not like you think. Don’t worry, I’ll get to it.

Let’s start with the image:

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CTSVmkeLS6 pounced:

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I have to admit that the truck does have the sort of too-smooth weirdness that goes with AI-generated imagery, and the lower edge of the rearmost window curves in a way that looks wrong. Space laid down the gauntlet:

The truck may indeed be AI! But if it is, it’s not for lack of effort to avoid AI images:

Here are the two images in question, and the “Exclude Generative AI” selection that I always make sure is on. In fact, I double-checked to make sure the button wasn’t grey to indicate it was not selected, but no, that’s just how the exclude-AI button looks when switched on.

As you can see, the smoke in the stock photo as supplied was black and diesely, which Merc correctly called out as confusion-inducing, so I “inverted” the smoke to make it white-ish:

… and I think the white smoke, if anything, makes it look even more AI – oops. And the girl is a bit uncanny, TBH. But not AI, if the filter did its job.

Shall we go deeper? GENERIC-NAME did, and I am in their debt:

Since that JPEG of comments doesn’t click, here are hyperlinks to the “2021 scrape date” and the “few generic photos of cars” references.

[Editor’s Note: Pete does great work and makes so many great topshots. I think the real takeaway here is we should always find a fun/weird car or truck to use, unless it has to be something generic. And that’s why we can never use AI – those robots don’t know from cool cars. – JT]

So, it appears the truck must not be AI – at least not the type of AI where a prompt is entered – “a white pickup truck with billowing exhaust smoke enveloping a girl with her hair blowing in the smoke” – and et voilà, there’s Suzy Smokalot.

… but that’s not the only kind of AI, and in the interest of total transparency, let’s talk about the kind of programs we do use that could be considered AI.

One tool I use in nearly every topshot is Photoshop’s “Generative Expand” capability, which is invaluable for extending the backgrounds of images that would not otherwise fill the 1600×900 pixel “canvas” called for by the topshot template. Like this:

In this case (and nearly every case), no prompt is entered; I just click Generate, and bingo-bongo, the background is extended:

Now, you may have also noticed the basketball hoop behind the E-Class disappeared. After the background was extended, I used the “Remove Tool” to paint out the hoop – you can see it in pink:

There’s no prompt for this tool, you just paint over what you want removed, and the software attempts to figure how to fill the space. This may or may not involve AI, depending on the background.

I did say that in nearly every case, nothing is prompted. In instances where I’ve needed to use a prompt, it’s to stop the AI from generating things. For example, if it’s a pic taken on the floor of a car show, the AI will often paint in some scary body-horror facsimile of a show attendee that looks more like a transporter accident on The Enterprise. And so, the prompt will be something like “extend background, do not add figures.” The Photoshop AI also likes to put in signs with gibberish on them, so I’ll tell it to leave those out too. But again, this is infrequent.

I consider this use of AI to be innocuous, as it makes no change to the message of the image or its content in any meaningful way, and the changes could have been made “by hand” (so to speak), the way we used to do it, with the Clone Stamp and painting tools, albeit more slowly and potentially less convincingly.

It’s also worth noting that Photoshop says it only trains its AI on images it owns, rather than scraping the entirety of the internet with no concern for ownership or copyright and the like. “What about the images users load into Adobe products?” Well, that’s less black and white, but not anything Adobe doesn’t disclose, assuming you read the EULA – which pretty much no one does, but it’s in there.

So, to be completely transparent and precise, bits of grass, sky, pavement, and leaves on the outskirts of some images may indeed have been touched by something being called AI that, in previous times, might have just been called a computer program. But nothing you see (or read) at The Autopian is generated from nothing by AI, or even significantly contributed to or manipulated by AI.

We are in the business of making content by humans, for humans.