YouTube has decided that I have an interest in classic cars, so it shares with me the latest videos on that topic. For example, today at the top of my feed was a video about the 1950 Kaiser Special.
Of course, the above image is not what the video says it is. And the narrator has a staccato quality that sounds artificial. That got me curious about who would produce this.
Apparently someone in Australia who created a YouTube channel last summer called “Auto cars Avengers.” It isn’t clear what the channel is attempting to avenge except for the truth, because it has other fake profiles of postwar American cars such as a 1950 Packard Super Eight, 1952 DeSoto Firedome and 1953 Plymouth Cranbrook.
If one has the patience to listen to a complete video, one can find a few accurate facts mixed in with generic rhetoric and complete bullshit.
My first reaction was that there should be legal mechanisms to prevent misinformation like this from spreading throughout the Internet. However, after mature reflection, it strikes me that the cow may have already escaped the barn and isn’t going back no matter how hard we try to corral it.
So perhaps we might instead engage in what has been called “culture jamming.” Let’s all click into these videos so that they get maximum viewership, which may eventually nudge Google’s search engine into pulling content from them.
Someday when you type into Google “1950 Kaiser Special,” you might very well get the above image.
In other words, we can assist AI in rewriting American automotive history by merely making a few mouse clicks. Don’t you feel powerful?
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RE:SOURCES
- Auto Cars Avengers; 2024. YouTube. Accessed Dec. 11.
This is going to be a pain for me as I am interested in one-off, prototypes, and clay mockups. I can’t even figure out why this is being done. On a facebook site about Chicago we get occasional aerial views of Chicago that are “off”. I don’t want to sound like some character in a Terminator spinoff, but my hypothesis is something like this: Computers don’t see the way we do. By going to sites that would attract people familiar with the subject mmatter and by running these pictures, it is slowly perfecting its skills.
A couple more thoughts. Last night, my wife got a Facebook feed on an Untouchables remake that was supposedly released in theatres 12/1/24. We could find nothing about it on any other source. Also- I will admit the cars are handsome. Except for the YouTube Kaiser and Plymouth they look like something the carmakers would have made in 1943 or 44 if WWII had not intervened.
Things like this make me wonder whether there really is a legitimate use for AI technology. At all.
There are so many facebook automotive groups popping up these days and being ‘suggested’ for me, many of which put up information I know to be bogus, show misidentify photos, or show cars which I have never seen before in some 60-odd years of fascination with automotive history. There is so much ‘fake news’ and so many scams going around on the net; I’m much more inclined to believe what I have seen in print.
The cars you show are clearly not what they purport to be, the styling being a good 5-10 years behind the year they are alleged to be from, but anyone relying on the internet alone for knowledge could be very seriously led astray.
As far as I can tell, this is one of the many ways to extract ad money from YouTube. Use AI to conjure up some fake images (still or moving), create some garbage narration, et voila!
This really isn’t new, but with the recent proliferation of online AI image generators it has really taken off. It drives me nuts. So much so that I really won’t watch any car videos on YT that are not live-action.
Few people know enough about these older cars to know the difference. I saw a similar YT video claiming to show a 100+ year old car, but the thumbnail clearly looked like something that would have been built in the 1940’s.