Artificial intelligence might be the most rapidly developing tech that people are already tired of. I’m sure it’s great for… stuff, but as someone who writes on the internet for a living, I’m not a huge proponent. You and I have both seen it replace jobs for actual people in the past year, quite badly. But just because AI can slop together a five-slide listicle about the best Ozempic replacements for singles over 50 doesn’t mean it can realistically design a car for a legitimate automaker. Right?
Mercedes-Benz Global Design Chief Gorden Wagener doesn’t believe AI is there yet, but in an interview with ABC, he said it will do the bulk of vehicle styling and displace most of the real, skilled people involved in 10 years.
“We work with AI now,” Wagener explained. “You get 99% of crap with AI and sheer quantity. That’s the biggest problem—sorting out the good stuff from the bad. But you get 1% good stuff and we keep learning. It’s getting better every day.
“AI will drastically change the way we design. I think in 10 years maybe most of design will be done by AI and it will make designers obsolete. My successor will be a machine and will be much cheaper than my salary [laughs].”
I wasn’t there to see him laugh but in my mind, that definitely reads more like a nervous chuckle.
Jokes aside, how can that be? How can generative AI, which still butchers simple prompts and blurs written text into a jumbled mess, possibly pen a vehicle someone would want to spend Mercedes money on? I believe the answer is in Wagener’s quote there: sheer quantity.
It may not be the most efficient tactic, but telling a robot to simply do it again until it gets something right would probably be less costly than hiring somebody with a degree. But just because it could be cheaper for Mercedes or any other automaker obviously doesn’t mean it’s ultimately better.
Interestingly, Wagener’s words go against what Maserati’s design chief Klaus Busse told us last year. He admitted that “with AI, I can literally design 50 Maseratis while having an espresso,” but it isn’t the end-all. It isn’t the silver bullet.
“As of today, AI is not seeing the future, it’s only a mirror of everything it can find on the internet,” Busse added. “It’s a measure of all the things previously created [while adding] a certain degree of probability to come up with things that I might like.”
“So yes, we’re using AI for certain tools, but I don’t think AI is the solution,” he continued. “It’s just another tool, and just like other techniques used in car design, it requires an extreme degree of self-curation.”
Perhaps humans can still take care of the curation part…until AI can do that, too.
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