AI-rendered cars pollute search results a majority of the time you go looking for pictures of cars via Google Images or similar (DuckDuckGo, by the way, has a filter for AI-generated images if you’d like a cure). Once you learn to spot the yellow-tinted images, it’s pretty easy to see just how many there are. It’s frustrating, and unsurprisingly, the people designing cars for real aren’t happy either. At the IAA Mobility show in Munich, Germany, Mercedes-Benz Chief Design Officer Gorden Wagener spoke out.
“Sh**” Says Mercedes Designer On Gen-AI Cars
The designer does say that AI can be helpful in creating backgrounds for images to help save designers time, but that’s about it. The rest? Ugly, weird, or not “Mercedes” enough for the CDO: “It creates 99% of sh– solutions that are really ugly or weird or are not brand specific,” the designer said. “And yeah, 1% interesting stuff.”
Wagener also said that generative AI designs create another problem, and one that isn’t really unique to cars or design: their wild, all-too-perfect “creations” are over-saturating people with the ridiculous and abusrd, and in his opinon, makes us lose the “spectacular aspect” of show cars and concepts made by real people. “I go through Insta, and it’s just… another one. You get bored, you know? You just see it,” Wagener said. “This AI stuff is getting really annoying.”
Generative AI Designs Suck Because It Can’t Actually Design Anything
Bring a Trailer
The design head alluded to part of the issue in his comments to media, telling journalists that his issue with a lot of the AI’s renderings were that they did not look “Mercedes” enough. That’s because it takes a human being to feel out what a “Mercedes” should look like. Or, to change that definition. Those ideas come from years of training, a look at what Mercedes’ cars have been in the past, and the uniquely human idea to envision what they could look like in the future.
The reason an AI can’t make something look like a Mercedes is because generative AIs doesn’t create things the way we do. They scrape the internet and a myriad of other sources, often the work of real, human artists, for “inspiration.” There’s a reason companies like Midjourney are facing lawsuits from massive media conglomerates like Warner Brothers: AI doesn’t care about intellectual property. It’ll rip off whatever it needs to answer that prompt.
Â
