Artificial intelligence seems to be unavoidable in the online universe today. Google forces it on you when you do a simple search. Facebook shoves generative AI in your face regardless of whether you want it or not. There’s also no shortage of people outsourcing their thinking and creativity to a computer. Now, the RV industry is slumping to the level of generative AI slop, and it’s making an already untrusted industry look even worse.
I have the rather unique position of straddling coverage of multiple industries at the same time. If you’re a longtime reader, you know that I have covered aviation, cars, motorcycles, trains, RVs, and the very occasional boat for about six years. Over that time, I’ve found that covering cars and motorcycles works largely similarly. Manufacturers produce press releases and image galleries, and media gets invited to try out new products. Car and motorcycle companies also have press vehicles. There are plenty of moto and car influencers, but also plenty of people who aren’t.
There was a time when the RV industry surprised me in how it doesn’t work like the car and motorcycle worlds. For some RV manufacturers, a “press release” might be a post on Facebook, or some video collaboration with an influencer. You’ll be lucky to get press imagery at all, and if you do, there’s a high chance that the images were taken in portrait orientation, which makes absolutely no sense for an online publication. Or if you do get landscape images, they’ll be blurry and low-resolution.
RV coverage in itself has long been a bit baffling to me. The RV media space has a million influencers, and many of them talk about only what’s good about a unit, never seriously questioning anything else. The idea of someone physically reviewing a unit like a car journalist would test a car is foreign to many manufacturers.
Imagine if the car journalists who covered the early VinFast electric models or the electric Dodge Charger blatantly ignored the quirks of those vehicles. It would make you want to bang your head on a wall. That’s where I am with RV coverage. There are seemingly vanishingly few people who make RV content who aren’t interested in being an influencer. But I get it, being critical about RV quality means that some manufacturers won’t even give me the time of day.
Now, we’re seemingly entering a new era of disappointment in RV media. I have been noticing a trend of RV manufacturers resorting to generating AI slop for imagery that would easily be captured with any smartphone camera.
When You Can’t Tell What’s Real
The most recent RV company to confuse me is Aliner. As I noted in my coverage of the 2027 Aliner Alite yesterday, Aliner has been around since the 1980s. While it’s not an industry titan like Thor Industries or Forest River, it’s not exactly a little fish, either. Yet, when it came to launching a new product, I detected some possible AI shenanigans.
When I wrote my article yesterday, I decided to include low-resolution imagery from a dealership’s listing. Why? Because the image above is what Aliner deemed fit to publish as official imagery for its new trailer. I saw some other problems; in another picture, the light source switches completely to the other side of the image:
These images are bad for someone trying to write about a trailer. The portrait orientation doesn’t work for anyone not publishing on TikTok. The images don’t even show the whole trailer, either, so they didn’t even use the portrait orientation efficiently. Also, what’s with that weird white extension coming off the back of the trailer in that first image? It’s not shown in any other image. The shadows and reflections in the walls and the wheels also seem a bit odd when the sun is behind the trailer.
Aliner’s social media post containing these images was flagged as being AI-generated. Now, AI detectors aren’t flawless, but it was enough for me to decide against using these images.
Thankfully, Aliner has finally published nice, usable images of the unit, so I can now replace the dealer photos in my article.
AI So Bad It Can’t Even Get Names Right
Aliner is far from the only one. I’ve been writing about Lightweight Innovative Vehicle, or LIV, for years now. This company is one of my favorite RV startups for its ambitious effort to prove that RVs made with thermoplastic structures will last longer than traditional build materials. I also love LIVs for how shockingly affordable they are.
Throughout most of that time, LIV has had an arguably unimpressive website, and official imagery wasn’t exactly breathtaking. I suppose you could tell that LIV was a small manufacturer from that lack of polish, but the website and the photos got the job done. I see LIV like I see Aldi grocery stores. They weren’t big on theatrics, which was fine because you didn’t pay much, anyway.
But now, LIV has overhauled both its website and its imagery. At first glance, it’s impressive. Wow, LIV has come up in the world!
But then you look at it for a little while longer and realize it’s fake from top to bottom. I wonder what kind of SUV this guy is supposed to be sitting in?
What the heck is even going on in this image? What is that light source even supposed to be?
This AI image shows a parking lot reflected in the windows, no tire tracks, and it clearly didn’t know what to do with the background of the open side door. Also, I love how the AI couldn’t even get the name right, and “VIV” is on the side of the trailer.
This AI image couldn’t even spell the trailer’s model correctly:
Enhance! “Off Rord” is equal parts sad and hilarious:
The filenames for all of these images contain “gemini” in them, and the Gemini watermark is present in most of them, so LIV didn’t even try to remove the evidence.
This is all so deeply disappointing. I get that LIV’s old images (an example is below) weren’t exciting, but I’d rather have boring real images than “exciting” fake ones. I just end up going back to wondering why the company couldn’t be bothered to tow their own RVs out to a campground for real pictures.
Getting live pictures of an RV isn’t hard. Just tow it to your local forest preserve, snap some pictures with your phone, and that’s good enough. Or, since you’re an RV manufacturer, maybe just go to a campground and sleep in your own unit for a night.
This would be like if Ford didn’t bother actually taking the Mustang GTD to a track, and instead just had AI generate a fake track.
I also recently wrote about the Search4 Outdoors S4 Trailer. Image sourcing on this one was a total disaster because I couldn’t tell what was real. Supposedly, this image was taken at the Bahia Honda State Park in Florida:
But then there’s this image, showing the same trailer in the same parking spot, but the outdoor grille is gone, with surfers in its place. The second surfboard looks like a shark bit off its back. I can’t even trust that the original image wasn’t AI, and on close inspection, it probably is AI.
Even inTech, another brand that I have given lots of praise to in the past, couldn’t resist the call of AI. The company just launched an all-new travel trailer, and the hero shot, the image everyone is going to see when they land on the product page, is more AI:
The frustrating part is that the person who told AI to generate this image never even bothered to make sure the AI didn’t butcher the company’s name. Well, it did!
To the credit of the big companies, I haven’t seen much obvious AI from the likes of Thor Industries, Winnebago, or Forest River. Many RV manufacturers within these mega conglomerates will use composite photos. These are often a real picture of an RV combined with a separate, but also real picture of scenery. For example, here’s a Forest River tent trailer:
While it looks really weird, I’m more okay with it because at least I know the trailer in the image is real. Some companies will also do a digital image like this, which is also fine, I think:
In fact, Airstream, Thor’s flagship brand, is perhaps the absolute best RV company in the industry when it comes to photography, documentation, and history. Airstream goes through the work to actually haul its trailers out to scenic areas to have professional photos taken of them. The company also maintains an archive of documentation of historic models, and its blog has so many great pictures of old Airstreams. I wish all RV companies put in even just half the effort of Airstream.
So far as I can tell, the use of gen-AI imagery in the RV world is more recent and is, at least for now, seemingly limited to independent brands. On one hand, I get it; small RV companies don’t really have the resources of Thor Industries or Forest River. It’s easier to get an AI to cough out an image than spend valuable time hauling a trailer out to the wilderness. However, lots of small, independent RV companies still do take real pictures, like Scamp, Ember, or Bigfoot RV.
I also want to note that AI imagery doesn’t mean that the company makes bad trailers. I still believe in LIV’s thermoplastics and inTech’s futuristic-looking aluminum builds. But from the view of potential customers, AI imagery can look lazy. An RV might be the second-largest purchase a person makes, or maybe even the largest, if that person lives in their RV. The whole point of an RV is to take you on an adventure. It’s disappointing to see when a manufacturer doesn’t put in the effort to even depict an adventure. There are good uses for AI as a concept, like taking notes or biomedical research, but faking a road trip through gen-AI isn’t one of them.
So, if you’re one of these RV companies and you’re reading this, know that I’m not trying to bash you. I just think you’re doing yourself and your customers a disservice by not using real images of your products. I mean, just on a basic level, it’s a bad look if your company’s name isn’t even spelled correctly in your own imagery.
But maybe I’m off-base here. RV influencers already use tons of generative AI, and there do seem to be a lot of people who either don’t care about AI or even actively support it. So, perhaps I’m a young-ish woman yelling at a cloud here.
I do know that, at the very least, if I catch an RV manufacturer using AI, you can count on me not using said images in my posts. I want to show people what they’re actually going to get, not something fed through a slop machine. So, if you see me using dealership images when talking about a new RV release, AI is probably why. With some hope, maybe this trend won’t expand any further.
Top graphic images: International RV; DepositPhotos.com
Half of my team was laid off a few weeks ago. Because of AI. And because we’re the creative department. And seeing what’s becoming my replacement is sad. I’m already planning for my backup idea to take over because I know it’s coming. No more human creative industry people.
AI can do a number of things, but I don’t think it can yet *checks notes* fart so hard that it hurts
Sadly, I don’t think the Windsors have kept “farting” as a viable career path. The British monarchy really has declined over the centuries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roland_the_Farter
Well this sucks, I was already suspicious of online reviews, and bots in the comments, now I have to be suspicious of manufacturer images.
Guess this is the only website you can trust.
I recently worked for an apparel company that started using AI to create product images for ads. I pushed back HARD, because the details were all wrong, the fit was off, and the fabric didn’t move or lay the right way as the actual product.
Management’s response?
“Yeah, but it looks cool, so it will sell.”
I can tell you, if a company isn’t proud enough to invest in actual photography of their actual products, they’re more motivated by money than the bare minimum of integrity, and it’s a red flag.
The Fellowship is getting ready to enter the Mines of Moria in comfort and style. Duh.
Speak “fraud” and enter.
Keep on yelling at those clouds Mercedes 🙂
RVs are real estate of a sort, and the real estate photo business has been equally contaminated. Buyers and brokers are complaining about listing photos that add major enhancements like fireplaces and window views that don’t exist. When I worked in that industry, not so long ago, we had a bias against fraud and misrepresentation. We might add flames to a fireplace that hadn’t worked in years. You could fill a vacant room with “virtual staging,” but that came at considerable extra cost. Those enhancements became cheaper and more automatic every year, bringing us to this point of widespread fakery.
One high-end digital imaging product would be ideal for displaying RV interiors is the 3D “digital twin” product form companies such as Matterport. Through a link to their website, customers can climb inside and look up, down and all around. Have you seen that being used in RV advertising, MS?
I experienced this in person when we sold our house in 2020 and the photographer had a “blue skies guarantee”.
Just crazy.
That’s what happens when you have 2 million real estate agents in a country where only around 4 million homes are sold each year
I think that’s justifiable. The sky will be blue someday. Think of photographers and their listings in Chicago or Seattle, in the winter.
As someone who has been house hunting for a while, this trend absolutely blows. I’m not really sure how it can be legal rather than considered false advertising. I have seen so many houses that look pretty good, with no disclaimers, and only the very last photo in the listing shows what the property actually looks like – totally dilapidated, or with completely different features.
I like that in the OFF RORD one the trailer and jeep are blocking the view of the lake so the guy can stare at his trailer.
The AI slop is likely better than the actual shit they sell.
Appropriately timed because yesterday my department had a meeting about how they are looking at rolling out AI tools to help boost productivity in analysing engineering problems and presenting them.
I felt like a crazy person being the only skeptic in the room.
PLEASE tell me you cited Ford’s QA engineering debacle?
I just know whoever whipped these AI images up got all kinds of accolades for being super efficient and innovative. It’s what most bosses want to see these days :-/
How much do you want to bet that the company CEO told employees they had to use AI to “improve their productivity as much as possible”?
The “Off Rord” picture, the (fake) guy in the photo is dumb enough to park his Jeep and trailer in between him and the scenery. <Seinfeld>What is up with that?</Seinfeld>
I’m sure it’s a Jeep thing, and we wouldn’t understand.
Did you not see the mountain decal? The trailer is the scenery.
Trailer quality is so bad they dont even want to risk using one for photos.
IMO there’s a certain sleaze that bakes off RV manufacturers (not all, obviously, but a lot) – so this fits.
Slop shit content for a slop shit industry, feels somewhat fitting.
I went to an Asian food festival this past weekend. Over half of the booths had AI generated images of their food on the banners. Impossible to tell what you were actually getting.
The food thing is the one that makes me the craziest. You have a smartphone, and the food! I’d rather see a “bad” photo of real food than whatever AI hallucination thinks humans eat.
Dunno if it’s still the case, but at least it used to be illegal to fake pictures of food. If you’re selling ground beef, the picture has to be ground beef, and it has to be your ground beef. Everything else can be fake (bun/lettuce/etc for a burger) but the product being sold must be the product that’s in the picture.
Wonder how that applies to AI menu images.
I would trust an AI banner image at an Asian food festival to save humanity from an allergic reaction to shellfish before I would trust Thor Industries not to screw over both its customers and employees.
To be fair, it’s not like anything on the McDonald’s menu board looks like what you get. Think of this as the mom-&-pop version of hiring a “food stylist.”
It’s still real food. It might be juiced to the gills to make it look fancy, and they use all sorts of misleading tricks. But at some point it was food. To me, using AI to generate images of something you are selling should be false advertising. No food was involved, just an earth-burning machine to make a few assholes rich.
I’m seeing it everywhere. You got a small towns or whatever and people just don’t give a shit. I went to visit my parents in Tennessee and saw a huge billboard for some sort of local fuel company and it was a AI generated eagle driving a truck. AI looking as fuck but you know, I guess most people just don’t care.
My local Home Depot has a like 6 foot tall standee of an anthropomorphic lion wearing an HD vest that says BE A LION. The lion’s skin has some weird, somewhat scaly texture to it, and it all looks so terrible. Makes me want to avoid them.
I’ve also seen it at signs at farmer’s markets now, and I think that gets to me the most. Ostensibly, farmer’s markets are for small, local businesses to sell things. Yet they don’t want to pay a small, local artist for a logo? Or a simple banner? If you don’t care about the effort but into your display and just make AI do it, I won’t care about the effort you put into your product.
I’ve been off-rording for years. My favorite place was on a visit to Hosstralia where I spent a month in the Outbark.
This is perfectly timed, because I wanted to tell you that I appreciate you what you do. I know I show up and grumble a lot, but your coverage helped me make a reasoned, justified plea to my brother not to go to a camper & RV dealership because all that was waiting for him was rotten particle board and luan.
He likes to camp, sure, but not that much. I told him your family horror stories about RVs falling apart and rusting on the day of purchase, about particle board snow, leaks, and stolen cushions. I know he’d end up with some crappy little pull behind rotting in his driveway, and I don’t want that for him.
Thanks, Mercedes.
Tell him to go to Scamp if he’s north of the Mason/Dixon line and Casita if he’s south of it.
“This AI image shows a parking lot reflected in the windows, no tire tracks, and it clearly didn’t know what to do with the background of the open side door. Also, I love how the AI couldn’t even get the name right, and “VIV” is on the side of the trailer.”
Also, the woman with the coffee cup and the hat has six fingers on her right hand and six toes on her right foot!
Always an A.I. flag.
Someone was looking for her…
It always surprises me that the same tells from three years ago are still present. They keep saying they are getting leaps and bounds better and they still haven’t figured out hands!
What a time to be alive! I never thought I’d see the walls of reality crumble before my eyes
Luckily the walls of any given camper aren’t far behind.
There’s been a recent push by these AI companies to find a market that will actually make them money. Marketing images seems to be a big one. I’ve started seeing ads on streaming that are pushing Etsy sellers and similar to use AI to create images of their products in a showroom environment instead of the kitchen table. Which definitely makes me less likely to purchase from someone on Etsy. Especially since AI is especially bad at scaling the product. It’s every bit as bad as the dropship companies that have clearly pasted a model onto their air mattress or whatever.
I’m sure that the AI companies have done a full-court press convincing these RV companies that it’s so much cheaper than hiring a photographer and finding a location. Thank you for calling it out and refusing to spread their fake images in your write-ups.
Agreed – it makes the products look like Temu knockoffs. I don’t like the images on the Temu knockoffs either, but at least those are cheap.
Have you seen the facebook marketplace AI images yet? Mostly just actual vehicle photos (car, truck, boat, but sometimes tools or home goods) with a bikini-clad model leaning on them. Loses my click, but you know a lot of creepy old guys are clicking on those.
That doesn’t even get into the Facebook AI generated info on the vehicle. Not gonna lie, sometimes it’s helpful because people don’t post shit for details despite trying to sell 5-figure cars. But half the time it directly contradicts the sellers notes (referencing the v6 model’s power figures when the seller specifically notes it’s the 4-cylinder, for example)
Yeah, I stopped using FB Marketplace the first time I ran across the AI info because it was of no use. It just picked an engine that was available (I can’t remember what I looked at, but it I think it had a V8 listed and clear V6 badging) and offered what may have been accurate info for a trim that would have that engine.
The continued enshittification hurts my soul.
From the ashes It’s Craigslist’s time to shine!
Wait until you start to read reviews on both kitchen appliances and/or major home appliances (fridge/stove/wash/dry).
They’re all AI written and/or paid promotions.
It’s all awful.
a few days ago I saw that doordash/uber/grubhub (don’t remember which) had menu descriptions “generated with the help of AI.” Fake descriptions based on fake pictures. What a time to be alive…
And we’re not stopping there, there is this “restaurant” chain called Wonder appearing in major cities (it’s just a giant “ghost kitchen” purpose made for food delivery apps) and the CEO fully admits that he uses AI anywhere and everywhere possible to design the “restaurant” concepts, the menus, and recipes. So you can look at AI generated photos, read AI generated descriptions (or have your personal AI
data collection botassistant do that and summarize it for you) to have an AI-powered cooler on wheels deliver your AI generated food that tastes precisely how all that sounds. For just four easy Klarna payments of $15.Sign up for Klarna+ today and get a $15 credit toward your first payment!
Also, required viewing for anyone interested in ghost kitchens: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkIkymh5Ayg
Yeah, we were in the market and ended up using Consumer Reports to narrow things down. Our local library has a subscription for the website which was very helpful. Support your local libraries, folks!
The grief and jokes we make of Consumer Reports, it’s genuinely appreciated that they have a reasonably independent position in their testing and can provide actual test data.
That guy on the LIV homepage can really bend his arm in mysterious ways.
After parking the trailer next to the Escher Picnic Table, and unhooking, he drove into the lake. Give him a break!
I think that arm is from a dwarf behind the couple, holding an item over the guy’s lap. The man’s right arm is on the woman’s back.
Don’t knock their throuple. Also, I don’t think dwarf is the preferred nomenclature.
It might be though? , “midget” is the incorrect nomenclature. Unless you are talking about the car.
Reserved for the car, absolutely. I thought it was “little person”? But I was mostly making a Big Lebowski reference.
I suppose it’s hardly surprising that an industry known for producing mass quantities of physical slop is quick to jump onboard technology that produces mass quantities of digital slop.
A few months ago the blog over at Revzilla caught BMW using clearly AI generated press photos trying to sell a $30k (read- very much luxury/premium) motorcycle, meanwhile Royal Enfield sends professional video crews with production quality better than anything Netflix has farted out in the past year all to promote a line of motorcycles that costs anywhere from $4-8k.
RV manufacturer “don’t cut corners” challenge: impossible.
I was just going to make the joke about the physical slop and you beat me to it!
One: great point succinctly stated.
Two: ugh I wish I had a $30k motorcycle budget. Or budget in general.
I’ve seen the same sort of thing with small pickup truck videos on YouTube. The YouTube algorithm detected I was interested in them, and about a year ago I was deluged with a bunch of videos showing upcoming small trucks from various manufacturers, almost all of them were 100% fake. I kept blocking channels and downvoting videos and it’s under control now.
My father sent me an article a couple months back about how Chevy is bringing back the Bel-Air. I don’t a human was involved in any part of that tripe, from the words to the images, but it got my 70 year old dad hook, line, and sinker.
I have a friend in his 80s that was telling me last week about a new engine he saw, Elon Musk created the holy grail of engines that runs on water. I delicately told him there is a lot of AI-generated content on the Internet.
Yesterday I spoke to him and he was having an existential crisis that everything is fake now. I told him yes there is a lot of AI content and a lot is outright wrong, but if he sticks with reputable news outlets like AP, Reuters, and CNN, so far they are ok.
Also this video was pretty eye-opening, they show older people videos and have them guess whether they are AI or not, and they aren’t very good at it. Some of their decision-making logic is downright nonsensical:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nehTMYzpGYE
I’m only 39 but I fear that it’ll happen to me when I get older as well. Cognitive decline is unavoidable, so I know I’ll inevitably fall for stuff too. God only knows what it will be like in 30, 40 years.
The RV industry could use more connection to reality in all kinds of aspects of their businesses.
Also the old people who can afford these expensive toys are also the people so easily falling for AI slop everywhere else and think it is cute to paste AI slop of themselves on social media.