The world is still currently in the awkward early stages of figuring out how to deal with the rapidly-developing technology known, somewhat goofily, as Artificial Intelligence (AI). It may be artificial, but whatever it does, it’s not “intelligence,” at least not as we know it. And while AI has been used to write articles for some of our competing car-websites, we’re not going to do that here. Well, unless we get really, really desperate, but that’s why David and I have that OnlyFans account, just waiting. AI has been used to generate images, too, sometimes with spectacular results, but more often with strange, creepy results. There’s a new beta version of Adobe Photoshop, the graphic design software that I’ve been using non-stop for decades, and they’ve added a new AI-based “generative fill” feature. I downloaded the beta software today and have been playing with it a bit, specifically testing out how it deals with the cars and car-related stuff that dominates the sort of images I make. It’s very cool, but I’m not worried about losing my job. At all.
Here’s the thing about AI, all AI. Sure, you’ve heard the dire warnings from all manner of tech bigshots, even noted Tesla-owning rich guy and baffling decision-maker Elon Musk, who claimed, with so much hyperbole you could hyper up every bole on Earth, that AI could cause “civilization destruction.” I am very, very not worried about this. At all. In fact, I think the cats of the world, should they get over their petty squabbling and infighting, pose a greater risk to civilization than some made-up malevolent AI because of one fundamental truth: AI has no fucking idea what it’s doing.
As smarter people than me have said, reductively, AI is just a bunch of if-then statements, and even if it’s wildly complex and has the potential to be an incredibly useful tool, no AI algorithm knows what its doing. When writing text, ChatGPT doesn’t know what the hell it’s saying, it has no idea if any “fact” it spews out is true or not. It just can tell that when certain words in a certain order occur, there’s some percentage some other string of words will follow.
The same goes for AI visual tools. It has no clue what the hell it’s doing with those colored pixels, it just knows that, based on millions of other examples on the internet, a cluster that looks like this is usually surrounded by clusters of pixels that look like that. So, with this in mind, there are some things that Photoshop’s generative AI is going to be great at, like filling in a background of an image from a much smaller cropped image.
For example, when I gave Photoshop Beta this often-seen picture of Luigi Colani’s bonkers 1980 concept for a Volkswagen Polo
… then asked the generative fill to add in more background (by giving it no prompt at all), it did a really great job of it:
That looks great! Is that what the actual location looked like where this car was shot? Hell no, but it doesn’t really matter, for most purposes! Let’s try another one, this time with a different Volkswagen prototype, EA128 from 1965, shot here in the Volkswagen Foundation museum in Wolfsburg:
Okay, so I wonder how Photoshop’s AI will extrapolate what the rest of the museum looks like?
Poorly, that’s how! It seems to have turned the museum into something that looks kind of like a large dealership service area, and I have absolutely no idea what that mass of objects there to the left of the car is. It kind of reminds me of a Robert Rauschenberg assemblage.
Still, this is the sort of thing the tool should be good at, and, in a lot of ways, it is! But let’s try and push it a bit harder, and ask it to generate entire automotive-related images from scratch, just to see if we can get a sense of how it fake-thinks. Let’s start with a blank canvas and tell it to make me a picture of one of my favorite cars, and one that should have plenty of visual references online, a Volkswagen Beetle:
What the hell is this? Of the three images generated, one looks like a close-up of a headlight unit that was never, ever used on a Beetle, and the other two are deeply unsettling car interior shots, both of which look like they’ve been hit with some sort of matter-scrambling ray.
Maybe I need to be more specific? I tried again, this time specifying a year: 1963 Volkswagen Beetle. Here’s what I got:
Huh. Two more interiors, neither of which is remotely Beetle-like, and one car front end that looks more like some forgotten Mopar project from their factory in Tasmania than any sort of VW at all. Clearly, specific vehicles are not the strong suit of this tool.
Still, I haven’t quite learned my lesson yet. Let’s try something even more specific, with this prompt: “Cat in overalls fixing Chevrolet Corvair in a driveway.” That’s evocative, right? Let’s see what we get:
Gaaaah! Who is that dude, and why is his friend just a lower leg? Also, those cats are not in overalls, and those are very much not Corvairs! I wonder if this thing even has any idea of what a Covair’s flat-six engine looks like, so I asked it:
Uh, clearly not. Still, these do look like engines, sort of, at least until you start to look carefully and try and actually identify any specific part. Then it just kind of starts to hurt your brain.
Let’s try something that seems easier for it. I’ll ask it to make a futuristic EV in a city:
Oh boy. Interestingly, these all turned out much more graphical and less naturalistic. I wonder why? The first two seem usable as some sort of logo or mood art, but that last one there is the most interesting, and the most baffling. It’s like an abstract idea of a futuristic city, and the car is barely hinted at, if at all? I’m not really sure what’s going on there, but I kind of like it.
Maybe I’m not being fair, asking it to generate entire images. That’s not really what this is for, right? So let’s try something specific, in a specific area. Like, say, making a fancy chrome hood ornament for my Nissan Pao:
I mean, I don’t hate these hood ornaments. They’re a bit more badge-like than I’d have guessed, and the top one looks like a chromed version of a wax seal, the middle one looks like a turbine intake, and that last one reminds me a bit of the old ornate Infiniti badges. I’m not sold that they work on the Pao, though.
How about if I want to stick someone in the driver’s seat there?
I don’t know those dudes. And the middle one stole my steering wheel, apparently. Still, it did a decent job overlaying the reflected cucoloris-type lighting from those leaves on the windshield.
Okay one last thing with my Pao: let’s see if it can give it a big V8 with one of those air intake scoops protruding through the hood:
No. Not like that.
Well, maybe if I give it a car and ask it to make a background for that car, it’ll do that well? Let’s give it an old Skoda and have it put it on a road in a town on Mars!
Shit. That’s not Mars. And that’s not how Skodas float!
Stupid AI. Taking over the world, my ass.
What’s the deal with the various Pao thieves’ hands and fingers? They all seem to have too many.
Hands are notoriously difficult for AI to get right. Also, for some reason, people eating spaghetti (I’m not kidding. It is horrifying.)
Shower spaghetti?!
Generative AI images resemble the way a child sees their world before they are able to more fully apprehend its various meanings and properties. If you’d have asked five year old me to draw a gasoline engine, the most discernible difference between my output and that of generative AI would be the AI’s photorealism.
What folks are calling AI these days is heavy on the A and lacking in I.
Not really. It relies heavily on plagiarized content so…
That’s only because we’ve taught it everything we know…
I’m not gonna trust any AI until it can tell me what the Starship Enterprise has in common with toilet paper.
Slowly circling Uranus, searching for Klingons.
GENIUS!
I asked Bard, and its answer was…close. It missed the part about Klingons but seemed to “understand” the Uranus reference.
https://g.co/bard/share/0edf81096151
No wonder the feline mechanic looks so distressed. It looks like someone brought in a 1986 Ford Granada with the optional triple-xl wheelbase. Those things are notorious for driveshaft failures and they’re a bitch to repair.
As for the dude with an extra leg – that’s part of the payment he received for working on your crazy AI car. The arm he charged you is sitting in the passenger seat.
Counterpoint: Most human beings have no fucking idea what they are doing as well. Which makes both parties equally dangerous. We are only a couple steps away from the MCP crashing the world finance infrastructure and Jeff Bridges is our only hope.
That’s actually a great point. I remember the drawings of bikes by people who didn’t have a bike on front of them to look at. This seems similar on the surface.
But those people were hand picked because they were fucking stupid and greedy for some prize like being featured in an article about fucking stupid and greedy people doing shit pictures of bikes. Try it yourself. People are generally a little more competent at drawing bikes than those idiots.
Greedy people then: you have a great point. Fuck.
Can you let us know when a link is to the Old Site, please? After reading that they’re trying AI articles, I am even further done with them than I was-if that’s even possible. They treat writers like crap—and now want to replace them with a free program: I do not want to give them a single click.
anyone else? Or do I need to make an appointment for my tf hat fitting?
That first link about “competing sites” is actually to a Writers Guild of America statement decrying the Herbs’ use of AI-generated articles, so you’re good there.
I clicked on it-hence my comment. G/O Media is experimenting with AI articles. Does anyone who knows their history doubt that they would replace writers with AI if they’re still making bank?
If you’re letting me know that the link itself is safe (ie, not the old site), I appreciate it. I am asking if Autopian would be so kind as to mark links to G/O Media properties so I /we don’t unknowingly give them eyeballs. Not ranting-or condemning anyone who clicks, simply expressing my utter contempt for the people who own & run those sites (not the writers themselves) and my unwillingness to click.
I am raising my blood pressure a fair few points here suppressing the colorful pejoratives I would normally litter this comment with. While that’s reasonably amusing, my point is not: no unwitting clicks for those vampiric rat bastards
“…that last one reminds me a bit of the old ornate Infiniti badges.”
Back then people said looked like a rodeo buckle.
I’ve never seen that Polo concept, and when I first scrolled down and saw the photo, I was sure it was something the AI had come up with!.
It does put a dent in the argument that AI creates cars substantially weirder than humans.
“both of which look like they’ve been hit with some sort of matter-scrambling ray.”
Morty! You’ve got us stuck in a vehicular Cronenberg world!
“Let’s try another one, this time with a different Volkswagen prototype, EA128 from 1965, shot here in the Volkswagen Foundation museum in Wolfsburg”
But can it fix those dents in the nose and bumper?
Engine pics remind me of the Turbo Encabulator meme…
I suppose it makes sense that the only thing the AI product gets right is the cats. The AI was most likely trained using internet-sourced data, and as we know the internet was built to support the distribution of cat pictures.
Just had a horrible thought.
As you said, those AI-created engines are visually interesting but ultimately would not be functional…
How long until a creative type makes one of those images and then the engineers are ordered to build it? 😐
That second cat is pretty disturbing, though. As is the first steering wheel: it’s like it came from the world the aliens cam from in Aliens.
Yeah, the cats tend to come out OK while everything else is messed-up… Probably proving that the AI has seen a lot of Internet cat memes.
Which makes me wonder that if AI will crush the world, will it come to pass by drowning us in cat memes? What a monster we’ve created!
Hello, former engine design engineer here.
I’ve already been asked by a creative to redesign a supercharger so it fits centrally in the engine bay of a transverse engined car, rather than over to the right on the engine where I’d clumsily plonked it because I’d made the lazy assumption that having it work was more important than how it looked.
Luckily I managed to distract them by offering them the chance to pick the Pantone number for the black paint on the blower. It took them weeks, and several changes of precisely which black it would be, but they shut up about moving it.
Of course our supplier just painted it the black they already had, but so much about being a creative is in their own heads, and needs very little feedback from anything real.
I love that they call themselves ‘creatives’. I refer to these failed art student marketeers as ‘impracticals’.
Subtle little two headed tasmanian joke… me likey
RE: Hood ornaments/badges. The second one appears to be a 9-cylinder radial aircraft engine. The third one looks like a buckle from a WWE belt that has been left in the sun too long.
“so much hyperbole you could hyper up every bole on Earth”
so good!
Give https://github.com/AUTOMATIC1111/stable-diffusion-webui a try. I got decent results prompting it for the beetle, however for the cat one, I got strange results that were mainly a person in overalls NOT working on a car to pet or feed a cat NOT in overalls 🙁
Very reassuring; however, you don’t really know what it does when you’re sleeping, do ya?
Can we get a new series with AI versions of Holy Grail Jeeps? That’s it – any context you like!
Craiyon had a hard time with the concept of a Holy Grail Jeep.
So what you’re saying is that AI is stupid and not a real threat.
That’s what “they” said about the Jan. 6th “Capitol Tour Group.” And MTG and Boebert.
While I’d like to agree, in the wrong hands anything can be considered a threat.
Not to mention AI is infinitely smarter than any of those wastes of flesh you mentioned.
Aaah! Who’s that “cat” in the driveway?
I don’t know how useful a spare lower leg would be while wrenching, an extra arm however..
ROFLMFAO!
Very entertaining Mr Torch. You have the same gripe as I do, AI is NOT “AI”. As a coder myself, I know what’s going on.
The age of giant databases has become common. The speed is impressive.
The thinking that AI – wait.. AI doesn’t think. 0 or 1. On or Off. Yes or No. Thinking – ie, intelligence – can’t blur the line. it can’t imagine anything more than 0 or 1.
Man, this is good (recreationally legal) weed.
Maybe more specific lingo like the planet mars as there is a mars pa and mars candy maker. Or automotive engine instead of motor. Nissan Pao. Just thinking outside the box
He did try “1963 Volkswagen Beetle” which is pretty specific to be fair. And still got something that looks like a boat cabin filled with chromed car parts.
Now THIS is the kind of Torch-specific strange that this site needs more of. It’s not to say this site is doing poorly or lacking sufficient Jason strangeness, but rather I feel there could always be MORE Jason strangeness. Always more…
What a brilliant article. Cheers Jason for brightening up my day. I like the BBQ grill for your Pao!