{"id":637407,"date":"2026-04-30T00:01:21","date_gmt":"2026-04-30T00:01:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/637407\/"},"modified":"2026-04-30T00:01:21","modified_gmt":"2026-04-30T00:01:21","slug":"i-want-to-kvetch-about-what-i-hate-about-ai-when-it-comes-to-car-stuff","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/637407\/","title":{"rendered":"I Want To Kvetch About What I Hate About AI When It Comes To Car Stuff"},"content":{"rendered":"

I don\u2019t think anything I\u2019m going to say here is going to be particularly shocking or Earth-shattering to anyone, but I\u2019m sort of frustrated and feel like saying it, and I have to do a Cold Start anyway, so I may as well put it out here: AI is making my job harder. I know that\u2019s the opposite of what the conventional wisdom may be, but for those of us who give a brace of BMs about, you know, things that actually exist, AI is a plague.<\/p>\n

Though, to be honest, the more I think about it, it\u2019s not that AI itself is the plague; like all problems, it comes back to us humans. AI is just a tool, for better or worse. It\u2019s the way humans are using AI that\u2019s the real issue. I\u2019ll explain.<\/p>\n

\"Vidframe<\/p>\n

\"Vidframe<\/p>\n

I\u2019m bringing this up because of an Instagram post I happened to see that caught my attention like a cat grabbing a dropped piece of sashimi. It was a post that was seemingly designed in a lab to get my attention: it was about a Brazilian Volkswagen, specifically a plan to update the Type 2 Bus in the late 1990s in an attempt to keep it competitive. Here\u2019s the post:<\/p>\n

On the surface, it\u2019s a fascinating concept, and one that feels\u00a0extremely\u00a0plausible. Brazil overall has a long history of taking deeply obsolete designs and grafting on more modern faces and other details in objectively hilarious ways to try and drag old cars into the present, like what they did with the Ford Falcon (crap, as a commenter mentioned, this is Argentinian, not Brazilian, but the basic point still stands):<\/p>\n

\"Cs<\/p>\n

And Volkswagen Brazil certainly had plenty of experience modernizing VW hardware that traces back to the 1930s; take what they did with the Beetle chassis and drivetrain to transform it into a far more modern-seeming vehicle like the Brasilia:<\/p>\n

\"Cs<\/p>\n

So, the idea itself is certainly plausible. And VW absolutely did undertake styling studies to explore how the Type 2 Microbus design could be updated at various times; look at these, for example:<\/p>\n

\"Cs<\/p>\n

This concept was known as \u201cHeckmotor mit Lufteinl\u00e4ssen an der Front,\u201d which just means it has an engine in back and sucks in air at the front. It seems to be a mid-\u201960s design study. The compartment at the front \u2013 presumably for the spare wheel \u2013 is interesting, too.<\/p>\n

\"Cs<\/p>\n

This 1975 update clearly prefigures the Vanagon-type design that the Type 2 would become. I show you these because it just reinforces that what this AI-generated post is something that is, fundamentally, possible.<\/p>\n

So, when I first saw the post, I was excited; a 1997 project to update the old buses that Brazil was still producing? I\u2019m fascinated; this is catnip.<\/p>\n

And they look like something VW Brazil may have done: just the front clip was modified, with new faces that incorporated more modern lighting equipment and a bonded-type windshield \u2013 as opposed to the old held-in-with-rubber-grommet style \u2013 that a \u201990s car would have. They seem plausible!<\/p>\n

But then I looked closer, and saw the expected AI tells in the small text and logos:<\/p>\n

\"Cs<\/p>\n

Yep, that\u2019s AI. What about the other one?<\/p>\n

\"Cs<\/p>\n

Crap. AI, too.<\/p>\n

And the interior: this looks like what I would imagine a modernization attempt to the Type 2 interior would, in fact, look like:<\/p>\n

\"Cs<\/p>\n

Honestly, thank every deity for AI still being bad with text and logos, because those are still the quickest signs of AI bullshit.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s all very well done, and that\u2019s the problem. Well, it\u2019s a problem because nothing in the caption suggests it\u2019s AI at all. Now, I am all for making shit up \u2013 I love \u201cwhat-if\u201d-type speculation, and we do a ton of that here on this site \u2013 I\u2019ve done it before, and you\u2019ve seen the great stuff The Bishop does here<\/a>. But we always make it clear it\u2019s fiction, we\u2019re speculating and extrapolating and imagining. That\u2019s fun.<\/p>\n

Putting stuff out without the clarification that it\u2019s AI is simply deceptive. It muddies the water of truth and fiction, and that\u2019s just going to bite us in the ass. It already is.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not AI\u2019s fault that it\u2019s weirdly good at creating hypothetical cars like this; the fault is how we use it, and that it\u2019s being used to deceive instead of inform or entertain or spark thought. I hate that when I see anything online now that looks interesting, there\u2019s that seed of doubt that all too often proves to be accurate. It used to be fun to stumble upon something you didn\u2019t know before online, and now, well, who the hell knows what\u2019s real or not.<\/p>\n

Being real still matters. It always will. We will never use AI to deceive like this; when I want to deceive, I\u2019ll do it by hand, like our ancestors did.<\/p>\n

Stupid AI. I wanted these weird bus concepts to be real.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I don\u2019t think anything I\u2019m going to say here is going to be particularly shocking or Earth-shattering to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":637408,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[62,276,277,49,48,176730,61,238133,59690,238134],"class_list":["post-637407","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-cold-start","tag-technology","tag-type-2","tag-volkswagen","tag-vw-bus"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/637407","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=637407"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/637407\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/637408"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=637407"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=637407"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=637407"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}