Will AI Replace Real Cars in Movies? The Future of Picture Cars in Film and TV

I’ve no doubt as I write this that, somewhere, some tech bros are working to hasten the day in the not-so-distant future when the picture car business largely disappears. I mean, who really needs the hassle and expense of locating real cars for movies and TV—especially old ones—when you can let artificial intelligence generate a fake substitute?

There’s clearly still work to be done before these digital renderings are ready for prime time. Ask any car buff who’s seen the wave of automotive AI abominations turning up in their social media feeds lately. A lot of AI car images are flawed. Like the manipulated images of humans that give people six fingers, AI cars often sport missing doors, chrome trim that doesn’t match side to side, and steering wheels located to accommodate drivers evidently meant to sit in between the front bucket seats.

Particularly irksome, I find, is the daily bombardment of a whole new class of automotive videos that purport to document real cars getting pulled from barns, swamps, or junkyards. These fictional finds are then miraculously restored in a time-elapsed 60 seconds or less by an unlikely bevy of young lady cheerleaders in matching mechanic’s jumpsuits. Or perhaps by a few manly men in suspiciously clean and understaffed Eastern European garages.

Some of the nonsense is obvious to those with a trained eye: flawless paint jobs without even masking off the glass and chrome, ancient finishes miraculously falling away while rust holes disappear as if the venerable metal had been touched with a magic wand, and so on. These videos stretch credulity to the breaking point and beyond. And that’s before you realize that the machines they’re magically ridding of crust and crud in these short shorts are—viewed most charitably—virtual composites of multiple cars, with styling that vaguely recalls something… but nothing any factory ever actually produced.

Yet, much as one supposes that Teslas will one day possess truly autonomous capability (that the name “Full Self-Driving” already suggests) and Elon Musk has been promising—and selling—for a decade, there can be little doubt that throwing mega-millions further developing AI will eventually result in an automobile generator that works well. Perhaps even before the rapidly consolidating industry arranges to replace screenwriters, actors, editors, directors, and crews.

Sure, this means movies and television programs will ring even less true and seem even more hollow and same-y than ever before. But, hey—once upon a time people watched King Kong and later Japanese sci-fi movies like Godzilla and Gamera. They couldn’t have looked any more fake, but it didn’t hurt their box office. No doubt, we’ll get used to it. And we might as well, since we won’t have a choice.

One area where I see big possibilities for the AI picture car is the crash scene. At Octane Film Cars, my picture car outfit, we’ve been involved in an area of the business that hadn’t really occurred to me at the outset: supplying cars to crash.