Amazon Prime Accused of Using ‘Awful’ AI Background for F1 Doc
Amazon Prime has been accused of using an AI-generated background picture for its newly acquired Grand Prix documentary.
The picture for Racing Through Time – History of the Grand Prix 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 documentary’s historical theme, which was originally released in 2008. But closer inspection reveals strange inconsistencies, such as multiple wheels on the vehicles or double wings.
There are garages to the right of the picture that contain garbled text and some of the cars are incomplete or are just downright fuzzy.
“Say what you will about Ferrari strategy but their decision to put another two wheels on the rear wing in the early 2000s was inspired,” jokes one F1 fan on Reddit.
Other Redditors call the picture “horrifyingly awful”, “brutal”, “shameless”, and “insulting”.
Photographer Dan Ginn from Them Frames says instances like this are bitter sweet.
“On one hand it highlights how large companies don’t care about quality, opting to use poorly produced AI images rather than a skilled, professional photographer,” he tells PetaPixel.
“On the flipside it makes a mockery of AI image generation on quite a large scale. Hopefully, the long-term benefit of this is people lose total faith in these bad practices and photography prevails.”
Another Redditor wonders “if there is one guy that is responsible for uploading content to Prime and he’s completely overwhelmed.”
That last comment is pertinent since back in June Amazon Prime was caught using an AI-generated movie poster for the 1957 classic 12 Angry Men.
Quite why Amazon would choose to use AI pictures as promotional images for content on its platform is a mystery, especially since it presumably has access to the original movie posters or at least screenshots from the video itself.
Furthermore, the team at Amazon also appears to be using a particularly awful AI image generator. There have been some famously bad AI image generator services over the years and it seems the creative team at Amazon are using something like DALL-E 2 rather than one of the newer, more capable tools such as Flux.
