AI is coming to get you apparently. Well, it certainly caught me out a little while ago. Nobody died as a result, I was just very disappointed in myself, but I realised that there is something which can be done about all this. You can either humour me and join in, or flounce off to play with Demonic Grok for the rest of the day.
I don’t like AI.
I know it can make some administrative procedures less mind numbing. The dark side is if someone who once paid me cash money, no longer needs my sulks, delays, arguments, or payment demands with menaces nonsense, simply gets an article on the history of MGB from AI. It can probably do a reasonably decent essay in a couple of seconds which is mostly right. At this point I should get ‘Chap MGB’ to write one and then pick it to pieces, but I don’t need to, I know AI gets things wrong and bullshits its way out of any real world consequences and you do to. By way of stupid example, the fact that James Booth and Anthony Booth are two contemporary British actors operating in the ‘60s and ‘70s who were not related didn’t matter to the AI answer that Google gave to Mrs Bangernomics. James was apparently the Bolshie son in law of Alf Garnett according to a data centre in Changhua County Taiwan and that’s the end of the matter. Correct answers on a postcard please, more on that later.
AI gets things wrong, so that’s one reason to at the very least, mistrust it. However, we do only get use the low level a few years out of date versions, whereas big companies, tech and the government use state of the art Chatterbox GPT. That probably explains why all new vehicles now look like fridges because that’s what AI thinks we would like. And they would mostly be correct. It isn’t remotely creative, so AI will reproduce SUV clones all day long.
For the purposes of an image I’ve used for Free Car Mag, it does seem that AI could do a half decent job of flogging you a car. Car buyers do things different these days and this is where Biky.AI comes in—‘an AI seller s that turns every chat into a real business opportunity’. It said there. It’s a blinking chatbot, but the comely Femalebot Biky doesn’t just answer questions—it listens, interprets customer intent, provides accurate information, and guides them step by step to scheduling an appointment or even completing the sale. It’s a no brainer compared to some coffee drinking old boy telling you how good he was back in the ‘90s, or some pimply 20 year old failing to agree a ‘price to change’ yet again. So Miss Biky.AI, better known as Paula, yes really, is hired for my out of town lot with the tailgates up and balloons out.
Of course, the biggest fear is that AI will have your job, but then that depends on your job and that it isn’t something flaky in car sales. If it’s an office one that involves tapping things on a keyboard then chances are it’ll be quicker. We are being told that there is going to be a white collar job apocalypse. Never understood how the humble electronic calculator, or computer programme never put accountants on the street en masse. Maybe AI will. It certainly seems to be replacing people who write lists, produce bullet points and paragraphs of text, which may well be some sort of progress. Meanwhile, changing the oil and filter, remains a physical, finger digital pursuit. There is a lesson there, to have some practical life skills to fall back on.
People with bigger brains than me say that in their real world, a bit of AI actually does help to make the business of doing business better. It takes some of the slog out of the programming. Not surprisingly a programmer I know, reckons he has two years before applying to Amazon for a job in their warehouse. By then I think the AI robots will be driving all the forklifts and performing the picking. Apparently AI does not have to be better than you at doing any job, only cheaper.
Meanwhile in the arts, the AI carnage is real. The images created by the super clever programmes are quite scary and nightmarish. I have avoided using any for my illustrations and boycotted companies that send them as part of a press release. However, a colleague produces some podcasts for Free Car Mag occasionally, turning an article into a pod. He has a serious speech impediment so is unable to voice them. AI is actually frighteningly competent at this. Unfortunately the accents are American, but overlooking that, what a great way of putting two voiceover artists on the dole?
Anyway, I am going back a couple of years, but I wrote a paper for Net Zero watch about the war on the car. https://www.freecarmag.com/the-war-on-the-car-with-net-zero-watch I wasn’t overly happy about the computer generated image they used. Lots of Goblins, or as we now call them Dave (Zack) Pauldens (Polanski) populating the pictures. Yet the image I used on the cover of ‘Demotorized’ far better illustrated what is happening to motoring and a better metaphor, for Net Zero. Here was a black and white picture taken on a camera (print, not digital) in 1991.
When it comes to cars there are some fun concepts and what ifs, which are obviously are, what they are, but it is once they start to deceive is when we have a problem. What is particularly insidious are those videos, or ‘reels’ as the kids say, which feature a car restoration or reconstruction and you just know that the time frame is too short, the location too clean and the stop frame activity too smooth and perfect to be real. AI gives the half baked impression that a random rusty, obviously abandoned 1930s Bugatti can restored in no time by Sydney Sweeney’s sister, when it fact it is simply some sort of video fever dream. It is AI Slop, nothing more or less and a giant waste of your time and effort, however beguiling the made up images are.
Which brings me to the Twitter X incident I had one Saturday night. Let’s pile up my excuses first. I do social media on a computer, not a phone. That means I don’t zoom in on pictures. I take them at face value, more fool me. I try not to take things too seriously, this is meant to be fun and cars. However, I thought I’ll retweet a picture that seemed interesting. On the face of it, this was a mid ‘80s Fiat showroom in fabulous living colour, featuring décor I am familiar with. It looked like an importer shot, something for a press release at the time. Maybe part of a dealer recruitment or training programme. I should have known better. I went to bed and when I woke up on Sunday morning it seemed that the image was an AI one.
There wasn’t a meltdown any serious consequences or that many replies, just a nice bloke who actually designs vehicles taking the time to study the image. Nir Kahn (@Nir_Kahn) politely pointed out what was wrong with the cars (mixture of Fiat models) if there was indeed any timeline, as car showrooms have not always contained concurrent models. Obviously cars is something I am supposed to know about. I did spot a melted Nissan Micra/Fiat 500 hybrid outside, but only when I zoomed in. Same for the Stradas, not enough headlamps, or correctly located. As for the showroom itself, car sales with rotary dial phones is unlikely as all the offices I worked in ‘70s and ‘80s were ‘let’s get business done’ push button affairs. Yes, the colour was a bit too rich, but the positive spin on all this is the Y plate Miafiori is still on the road. So AI had found a Miafiori in a field at a classic car show and edited out the deckchairs, then transplanted it to what they reckon a showroom might be like. Overall rather sloppy.
Lesson learned, don’t retweet pictures, or anything really. Even for fun. So what can we all do? Physical media is one way out of all this. Real books and magazines, DVDs, scrolls, cassette tapes and vinyl.
There is a part 2 to this.
