Amazon Prime has been accused of using AI-generated background images in its newly acquired Grand Prix documentary.
The ‘Racing Through Time – History of the GP’ photo was flagged on Reddit after viewers noticed telltale signs of an AI image.
The poster image appears to show the evolution of racing cars, in keeping with the historical theme of this 2008 documentary. However, a closer look reveals strange inconsistencies, such as the vehicle having multiple wheels and double wings.
To the right of the photo is a garbled garage, with some of the cars either incomplete or completely vague.
“I don’t care about Ferrari’s strategy, but their decision to put two extra wheels on the rear wing in the early 2000s was an inspiration,” one F1 fan joked on Reddit.
Other Redditors called the photo “horribly gross,” “brutal,” “shameless,” and “insulting.”
Photographer Dan Ginn of Them Frames says cases like this are bittersweet.
“On the one hand, this highlights that large companies do not care about quality and are choosing to use poor quality AI images instead of skilled professional photographers,” he said. Speaking to PetaPixel.
“On the flip side, this makes a mockery of AI image generation on a fairly large scale. The long-term benefit of this is that people lose complete faith in these bad practices, and we hope that photography will become popular.” ”
Another Redditor wondered, “If there was one person responsible for uploading content to Prime, wouldn’t that person be completely overwhelmed?”
That last comment has become pertinent since it was revealed in June that Amazon Prime was using an AI-generated movie poster for the 1957 classic “12 Angry Men.”
Why Amazon chose to use AI images as promotional images for content on its platform is a complete mystery. Especially since it seems likely that they will have access to the original movie poster, or at least screenshots of the video itself.
Additionally, Amazon’s team also appears to be using a particularly bad AI image generator. There have been some bad AI image generation services in recent years, with Amazon’s creative team using something like DALL-E 2 rather than newer, more capable tools like Flux. It seems so.
