The biggest online classic and specialist vehicle marketplace in Europe, Car & Classic, has ventured into the digital world of AI by briefing a generative imaging AI programme to imagine in what kind of property owners of specific classic cars are likely to live.

Of course AI is inherently evil and will kill us all, but before Terminator becomes all too real, the images produced are at he very least interesting and sometimes quite beautiful. We rather like what happened here and it would have been even more fun to include an AI interpretation of what the owner looks like. It is certainly worth reading the complete article and taking a look at some of the fabulous images and the ones that went a bit wrong. I mean what is the car used to illustrate this story?

The matches and relevant illustrations produced are the result of an AI creative art process: given a specific brief – in this case, “imagine a property in the UK with an parked outside”, the programme sifts through thousands and thousands of digital images available on the internet, and chooses the likely outcome. Midjourney, the programme used for the project, offers a visual interpretation of the models (and the properties) rather than an accurate rendition of their shapes and lines.

This point is worth making where Car & Classic issue this caveat: Midjourney, like most new AI content generation tools, is still very much experimental and “learning.”

What that means is that its interpretation of the cars we’ve asked it to create is not perfect. For the purists among us, this means we’ll instantly recognise when Midjourney hasn’t quite gotten something right. Perhaps a vehicle is too big or the shape isn’t quite as it should be. We know and recognise that, but thoroughly enjoyed seeing how AI interprets both the vehicles themselves and the homes that the owners may live in.

Read the full feature here at Car & Classic