When you buy a car online, you’d expect what you see to be more or less what you get. Sure, some minor cosmetic defects might be too small for the camera to pick up, but you’re still looking at undoctored photos of a real car, right? Well, not always. Over the weekend, a Bring A Trailer listing went live with a beige 1999 Cadillac DeVille. Florida-spec vinyl toupee, 81,000 miles, your average retired-well church-on-Sunday car. Normally, this wouldn’t be noteworthy, but something strange is going on in the photos.
Now, let’s preface this by saying that there are some acceptable uses of generative AI in car photography. Using generative fill to remove unwanted lamp posts in the background isn’t dissimilar to clone-stamping them out, and can produce far neater results. Digitally extending the existing sky and pavement to turn a 3:2 photo into a 9:16 photo for social media is similar to just using copy-paste to extend a solid-color static background, and doesn’t fundamentally alter the subject of the photo.
However, this photo set doesn’t appear to be altered in those ways. Instead, it’s turned into an aggravating game of spot-the-difference, to the point where you would second-guess whether this Cadillac exists in anything close to its presented state.
Right out of the gate, we’re off to a rough start with a garbled licence plate. The photo above has been cropped in, but otherwise is identical to the one in the listing. While messed-up text is a hallmark of AI-generated imagery, modern phones have also been known to turn legible text into gibberish characters through photo processing. However, other stuff also seems fishy.
Here’s a photo of an actual late-’90s DeVille, and right out of the gate, there are differences. Mirrors that aren’t droopy, a very different layout of elements in the headlights, four horizontal slats in the grille rather than three, that sort of stuff. A phone camera’s image processing alone doesn’t explain these differences, and another photo of the auction DeVille makes things clearer.
That’s the correct number of horizontal grille slats and the correct headlight layout, but two main things stick out here. The first is a different style of wheel, the second is whatever’s going on with that hood ornament. It’s a little hard to tell without zooming in, but that’s not a Cadillac crest.
Around back, those aren’t DeVille tail lights, the wheels are different from the ones in both front three-quarter shots, that trunk emblem is clearly incorrect, and what’s going on with that licence plate?
Moving to the left rear three-quarter view, we get another completely different set of taillights, a different rear emblem, a new and unusual licence plate, different bumper trim, and painted lower trims. Never mind the unpainted-looking door handles, the random fender emblem, or yet another different style of alloy wheel.
There definitely appears to be some generative stuff going on here, and that’s before we get to the interior.
Hang on, is that a cobblestone floor? I know the “Top Gear” cottage-themed S-Class struck a chord, but what we’re looking at here just doesn’t seem real. The shadowing from the rear seat squab doesn’t look right, and shouldn’t there be a door threshold at the bottom edge of the picture?
Ah, yep. In this alternate angle, the carpet in the left rear footwell and, well, everything low and up-front disappears, replaced by stonework imagery. Someone’s been blatantly manipulating these photos with results that just aren’t real or representative of the actual vehicle.
In case that wasn’t enough for you, how about two column-mounted shifters and no ignition barrel – or is the stalk sprouting from it? That’s definitely carpet up front, but like, what are we doing here?
Oh, and the door frame above the mirror is just gone. Where’d it go? I don’t know, into the digital ether or something.
It didn’t take long for commenters to start piling on this listing. From “This listing is an AI trainwreck” to “What in the AI slop pics?
Some struck a more humorous tone, such as “Come on guys, we all know the 1999 DeVille is 20 feet long on the left side, 14 feet long on the right side, somewhere between 25 and 30 pavers wide, and could be ordered with the rare A-pillar delete.” Nicely done.
It took a few hours after the listing went live for Bring A Trailer to respond to initial comments, and the first communication could’ve gone over better.
Hello all,
Thank you for sharing your thoughts on the gallery photos. We share your concern about the authenticity of the images and are working with @seller to obtain additional images of the car. We will update the listing as soon as they’re available.
While the firm had eyes on the situation, the big question is why this was allowed to go live in the first place. Bring A Trailer director of customer experience David Duke commented on the listing after it had been withdrawn, writing:
We definitely understand the concerns raised by this situation. We want to make it clear that every listing on BaT is created by BaT staff and we are reviewing internally how these photos were missed by our team.
The legitimacy and accuracy of photos in an online auction is obviously of utmost importance and something we cannot allow to be manipulated by AI.
We very much appreciate the oversight and input of the community on this auction, which enabled us to react as quickly as possible to the photo manipulations that we missed when arranging the photo gallery. We do not think the seller was intending to purposely mislead anyone but was simply mistaken in their efforts to make the car look as appealing as possible. We certainly should have caught this before the auction went live, and for that we sincerely apologize.
A few hours later, Head of Auctions Howard Swig commented the following:
Thanks for all the comments and deserving criticism on this listing. This is clearly a huge error on our part with multiple points of failure in our process allowing this listing to make its way through our system and live on the site. Some folks may be surprised to learn that our curation, editing, and quality control processes are all very human efforts at BaT without reliance on computer algorithms or AI. The team works hard to put out accurate and vetted listings every day, but we screwed up here and will own that.
We have had a few memorable blunders over the years and I can say that more than a few of those were entirely my fault! I am also sure we will encounter more AI-related challenges in the future and that this won’t be the last mistake we make. So I hope this listing can serve as a wake up call for us to review where things went wrong and how we can prevent this from happening again.
When you’re paying a five-percent buyer’s fee, you’d expect better lot representation than you’d find on Facebook Marketplace. For a premium service, not catching these photos erodes trust and can harm an entity’s reputation. The big questions now are: What were these multiple points of failure, and what systems will Bring A Trailer implement in order to prevent this from happening again? “Multiple points of failure” suggests that multiple eyes saw these photos and rubber-stamped them. What prevented employees from taking a closer look and flagging them? I’ve reached out to Bring A Trailer and will update you should I hear back.
In a strange way, it’s a good thing that the listing photos for this DeVille were awful, because the manipulation of them was obvious. Considering how awful many AI-generated cars were just three years ago, the scarier hypothetical is: what happens if generative AI image software gets really good? If software like MidJourney, Nano Banana, and the like is eventually able to vomit up a full image gallery of a vehicle without any errors, the potential for misuse would be huge.
If the technology exists to convincingly and without any skill required remove rust, reconstruct peeling lacquer, or edit out a tear in a seat with only a few prompts, what’s to stop an unscrupulous seller from doing just that? One potential solution to that hypothetical would be for auction sites’ representatives or partners to physically inspect each vehicle, but the labor involved in that drastically changes the business model. Those people’s time is money, and so a seller fee may be required. For the rest of us buying from the normal used car classifieds, what we see in a few years’ time might not actually be a car as it exists in real life (and while a description that doesn’t represent true condition is an issue with or without AI, AI can definitely hide a lot more). I’d certainly be cross if I drove an hour to see a car with a huge scrape that wasn’t disclosed.
Top graphic images: Bring A Trailer seller; DepositPhotos.com
I’m not buying that in the slightest. The seller didn’t say a single thing prior to the auction being taken down, and clearly ran damn near every single photo through some AI tool to make the car look better. It absolutely screams of ill-intent. The fact that the seller was not banned or reprimanded in any way reflects horribly on BaT, but they do have a long history of letting bad sellers get away without consequence if they do enough business. It’s shameful, and BaT quality keeps getting worse. Cars and Bids isn’t perfect, but at least they ban shady sellers.
Maybe the seller was an AI employed by BaT to drive traffic.
Yep that’s a big oops alright, haha
We live in a world where truth is almost impossible to decipher.
I have little to contribute other than I don’t like AI. Don’t want anything to do with it. At all.
Looks like a chrome ring around a bucket of fried chicken.
Someone should start a car company with that signum.
Isn’t that the new hood ornament on the Presidential limo?
Maybe the backup car. I think the main one has two yellow arches.
We are generally cooked as a society. I’ve noticed that realtors have been quite egregious in their use of AI; for several months now I’ve noticed AI being used to alter the appearance of a home on sites like Zillow. Adding in lush green trees, using AI to virtually stage the home, and sometimes fixing legitimate flaws such as peeling paint. It’s all just more tools in the scammer’s box with little utility to the honest citizen. AI has largely diminished my quality of life, and I cannot wait for the bubble to pop.
That was going on the last time I bought a house in 2023, and it was annoying then. Let me see an empty room, I want to think about what I’d do with it, not how the realtor would do it if it were The Sims
And they add that unnatural yellow glow in the windows, like a Tom Kinkade painting
The big issue for me is that an ai bed is not at all to scale. Even if the house is staged with real furniture, that would be useful because I can use a queen bed to help me gauge the size of the room. However, ai furniture is not confined by the laws and rules of the universe, so it often times makes the room look much larger than it actually is.
Eh. Careful. You can be perfectly deceptive with a fisheye lens. I remember seeing pics of my own house when we sold and laughing at how absurdly big the (closet-sized) bathroom looked.
Just place a dollhouse bed in the room. Look at the size of this place!!!!!
I was just looking at a house listing where for one room there was both a shot with the carpeted room empty, and later a pic with a full set of furniture in it. Not only were the shampoo marks in the carpet identical in both, undisturbed by any footprints in the furnished one, but significantly, the furniture was all undersized a bit to make the room look bigger.
Kinda’ like one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s early homes?! But yeah, real estate pictures often lie (and I’m in the biz).
Most listings I’ve seen that have the room digitally staged also offer the same shot without the imaginary furniture. I may not be paying full attention, though. When I’m looking at listings right now I’m more snooping than shopping.
Last time we listed, our photographer digitally removed stuff like the cords from lamps and appliances, and added images to the TVs even though the TVs were off. I think he also made the floors look a bit shinier than they actually were. I find all this stuff to be relatively harmless, as opposed to adding in fake furniture or landscaping. But now I see he could have changed the floors to look like a cobblestone driveway and wonder if that would have helped drive more buyers our way!
“However, this photo set doesn’t appear to be altered in those ways. Instead, it’s turned into an aggravating game of spot-the-difference, to the point where you would second-guess whether this Cadillac exists
in anything close to its presented state.”Doug DeMuro today;
https://media1.tenor.com/m/qzfY4tahAqUAAAAC/close-curtain.gif
Someone posting discovery of AI slop in a Cars & Bids listing in 3, 2, 1….
Am I the only one digging the cobblestone look? Actual stones might not be practical, but a patterned carpet, I dunno, I kind of think it works with the DeVille.
Just grab a cobblestone front door mat and some scissors and go to town!
https://www.zazzle.com/stone_cobblestone_pattern_doormat-256632780232777259?srsltid=AfmBOorimhYATYwmVFamHHXHCcViQALYb-X4bZckET40SFR-wB5nM4XInHM
Handsome! This begs the question, which car would look best with a cobblestone motif?
I was 3D modeling a a guitar once and made the body cobblestone and the neck granite. Pretty, but it would be hard to get through a four hour gig with.
Having played man Les Paul’s over the years I’d correct that estimate down to maybe an hour.
I thought it might make an interesting carpet design/pattern. Then I noticed the driveway is actual cobblestones and I just fell out of my chair laughing. The floor of a car and the actual floor are no different to AI.
David Duke is an AI that generated Howard Swig
Is that what they’re calling Grok now?
Yes, and with a simple prompt, they can convert any car into a convertible, like questionable Nissan SUVs for example.
They were ahead of their time…
Couldn’t be grok, no pervy nudity.
WOW. Just… WOW.
When I lived in New Orleans and he was running for governor, there was a popular bumper sticker that said “Vote for the crook, this time it’s important”
Homeboy needs to go by his middle name for sure.
Unless that middle name is “Mortimer.”
Randolph is feeling a little slighted right now.
I’m dying LOL
Yeah, you’d think he’d add a middle initial
That’s even worse than the other Jason Torchinsky.
Yeah but you can tell them apart because that guy prefers headlights.
Weirdo.
Happy MLK Day, everyone
Plenty of ppl are observing Jefferson Davis Day right now (wish I was joking…)
So THAT’S what he is up to these days!
Don’t be silly. He’s off hawking precious metals and prepper foods through some white nationalist MLM. Bless his heart
Why even contact the seller to get additional pics? Who but a scammer would post AI photos of this boring, low-demand car that’s unlikely to get scrutinized (and probably thousands of other cars over different platforms)? Cameras are ubiquitous and less effort than using AI unless one is posting thousands of scam ads. Ban them and move on.
This much is clear. This slop was probably posted on multiple platforms (and may have be stopped before posting on multiple platforms)
BAT shouldn’t be allowing any AI edited photos period.
I’m betting it slipped their their AI. I don’t buy their proclamation that all their ads are cross-checked and edited by humans. This is the future…
What a surprise, another thing ruined by AI.
If BaT wants to save face, everyone involved with this should be fired or at least post their public apology and the reason why it got past them.
BaT has a long history of being very good at apologizing for serious, egregious errors, and this is another example of that.
At this point, it’s a wonder that anyone trusts their business to vet cars put up for auction at all.
Imho, it’s really imperative to inspect cars in person before buying them. I know that isn’t always possible for rare cars that might be on the other side of the country, but I would rather miss an opportunity than end up with a pile of AI slop in my driveway.
Frankly, I doubt that BaT will actually improve anything internally and wouldn’t be surprised if we see another, similar article on here in a few months.
They’re just gonna lower the pixel count to make it harder to spot. Then frame it as making the site more “mobile friendly” by using less data!
Like the opposite of the “56k, stay away” forum post titles back in the…fuck, I’m old.
It’s OK, I remember that too. I also remember becoming a member of car brand forums and finding great deals, getting help from real people. But people being asshats has ruined that for most sites.
The 355Nation forums for my Canyon, and the Gencoupe forums for my Genesis were some of the best people I’ve ever interacted with.
There’s at least 6 people I still talk to and visit today that I met on the genesis forums.
I wish the main social media sites would collapse. I’d bump my membership fee to have an Autopian forum. The Discord is already great.
I haven’t tried the discord after one first glance. I was going to offer up my Tyco slot cars (free) and Matt suggested the Discord. It looked like way too much of a new format and yet another social media platform. I bailed and have never gone back.
I’m cool with it, so long as they accept my totally legitimate and not AI generated currency as payment.
I had multiple people vet it, so you know it’s legit. Trust me, bro.
“We used our best AI tools to prevent sellers from using their best AI tools, but it turns out both AI tools were secretly having some sort of Clanker Affair behind our backs and they failed to disclose it, per our policy. Both AI bots were earlier spotted working at a Coldplay concert, where they botched the lighting cues for Fix You, which is one of the most egregious errors in the entertainment world.”
I saw the two AIs on the kiss cam at that concert.
I don’t see the hallucinations that led to this getting better in the near term. Most of the smart AI people have finally realized that you can’t just scale up a data center and make hallucinations go away. So, if someone wants to screw you over with fake or doctored imagery, they’re gonna have to do it the old fashioned way! Spend an hour in photoshop, or just steal someone else’s photos. Much easier.
we’re lucky they cannot figure out text. Given the ubiquity of, um, language, it’s like a disclaimer baked in to most images.
This is such a huge blunder for bring the trailer and erodes being able to trust them in the future as a platform. It goes without saying but screw AI slop!
Bring Ai Trailer. maybe they will deal in car NFT’s
Non Fungible Toyotas
Selling automobile NFTs, but only taking crypto as payment for them.
“ Bring A Trailer director of customer experience David Duke commented on the listing…”
Never trust David Duke to do the right thing.
hooo boy. its a wonder they dont make him go by dave. i’d skip right out and use my middle name if that were my first just to avoid any confusion.
If my last name were Duke, I would have changed my first to Bo by now. 5-year-old me would never forgive me if I didn’t.
“Why should I change? He’s the one who sucks.”
–Michael “Don’t call me Mike” Bolton
You must really love his music.
I should have scrolled more.
Curveball: David IS his middle name.
Why should I change? He’s the one who sucks!
I saw that name too and I was like “oh, so is this what he’s doing now?”
Yeah, came here to note the same. If it’s not THAT David Duke, my condolences to the unfortunate namesake.
Formerly known as Bring A Trailer Grand Dragon of Customer Experience…
Absolutely shame on BaT for letting this get through. Several of the photos immediately looked “off” at just a glance, and I’m a Gen-Xer (the new Boomer) who is supposed to be easily fooled by this. I have to imagine much of their staff is younger than me and should have caught this.
But I wonder what the seller was attempting to gain here? If the AI generated photos are misleading in any way it’d generate a complaint and BaT may restrict the seller in the future. Not to mention that the commentariat there can be particularly harsh and often catches any kind of discrepancy. Now the seller is rightly being torn apart for their action.
No way. Gen X’s ingrained skepticism should protect us from this. We haven’t believed anything anyone has told us since Al Capone’s vault.
But more digging/exploration was needed! Come to think of it, did he ever get around to that?
Yeah, I unfortunately see younger generations more trusting of what they find on the internet (including self-styled experts with no education, experience, or merit of any note). Upbringing that pushed many of us to understand that meritocracy was a farce vs negative free-thinking effects of helicopter parenting aside, we saw the birth of the internet and its evolution until now and all the scams and nonsense that developed along with it while younger people did not.
You would think that, but that certainly hasn’t been the case from what I’ve seen online.
No way, just look at all the AI slop Gen X is falling for online and I am Gen X. There are just as many rubes in Gen X as there are/were boomers.
I think anyone looking at a car auction site to seriously buy goes in with BS detectors at full power. Very different than the algo handing you a political meme that reinforces your existing ideology.
You never going to let Geraldo Rivera live that down
What’s most embarrassing is that they accepted a listing from doug_mcmurdo@carsandbids.com.
I think their auction volume has gotten to the point where a car that will go for so little probably didn’t get a lot of attention from the team. Then again, without any of the specifics, it took me less than a second to feel like the first image looked like the generated images from the Build Yours section of an automaker’s website, but for a 1999 model.
Ditto. But maybe that’s the problem. We’re used to seeing idealized images like that. It might not have clicked it was an inappropriate context.
As a late Gen-X as we my be somewhat insulated by how common these cars once were. Things that intuitively seem off to us may slide by a ‘ute.
Perhaps it actually has a radiator delete as part of an elaborate cooling system bypass, to skirt any Northstar head gasket issues.
That would also explain the modified front grill fascia—might as well add some more lightness. Bet that thing is a beast on the track (for about 8 minutes).
The cooling is an advanced phase-change system using paving blocks instead of wax.
“Multiple points of failure” suggests that multiple eyes saw these photos and rubber-stamped them.
Maybe they get 100+ submissions every hour and these looked close enough without zooming in? Especially if they aren’t familiar with Cadillacs. He owned up to it without passing the buck, I’m ok with it. And it’s just going to get worse.
They construct each ad themselves ffs. If they’re so overworked that they miss THE WHOLE RADIATOR MISSING, it really undermines their entire business model as a trustworthy seller.
What is the point of having humans do the thing if they’re not actually doing the thing? May as well have AI auto-generate the ad from submissions.
Yes! At the very least, it shows that the people supposedly vetting the ads know nothing about cars. I’d expect that those positions are at least filled with enthusiasts, but I guess not (or they’re seriously overworked, or potentially a combination of both).
Grok and Claude are working around the clock to verify the authenticity of each ad. Employees of the month!
Every week or so I think “#{*>?!, I bet AI is ruining _____” (most recent was online recipes, and the answer is “yes.”). Hadn’t thought of “car auction pics” until this article, so I wouldn’t have been primed to look for it. Then again, I don’t work for a car auction website where it would be my job to worry about that.
Maybe they have replaced the humans for AI for the cheap car ad production….
Nah, it’s just the new totally human intern Gemini having a crack at it.
I’m not familiar with Cadillacs either. Still pretty confident they didn’t come with cobblestone floors.
Ok I breezed the photos and definitely missed the floors. Ooof.
Yeah if the article had been “check out the best preserved example of the 1990-whatever DeVille,” I’m not sure I would have picked up on any of it. Maybe the double shifter or missing radiator. But I probably would have googled “DeVille two shift stocks” and given up when I didn’t see any results.