The news about artificial intelligence—AI in tech-speak—has generated a lot of controversy in creative circles. Hot-rodders who are more focused on hands-on things than what’s happening in Silicon Valley may think AI is way out in left field and that it will never touch their lives. Here at HOT ROD, we haven’t focused too much on it up to this point. Among the issues faced is how professional creators will get paid in an era where computers can now spit out masterpieces that normally take highly-trained artists hundreds of hours to ideate and crystallize. For some, it’s a moot point; nothing can replace human creativity. But what if you aren’t a talented artist or loaded with a big budget for rendering your next project car? Can AI get you to a place that’s 80- or maybe 90-percent of the way to your final design goal for only a few dollars a month?

Your author was on vacation over the Labor Day weekend when a fairly normal family get-together took a sharp left-hand turn into the unknown: My brother, Dave Hunkins, a black-hat consultant to the tech industry, pulled the AI card on me. A consummate creative type and techno-nerd, David flipped open his laptop and logged into a website called Midjourney.com. This site specializes (as best I can tell) in creating pictures out of whole cloth using a gazillion images scraped from the internet. Mind you, my description of all of this is far from technically correct, and this author’s ignorance is sizeable enough that I wasn’t able to even master the secret handshake for signing up to Midjourney’s services. For those who can, subscriptions start at $10 per month. What you’ll see on these pages is the result of about an hour’s worth of time, most of which Dave and I spent arguing about how to goad Midjourney into producing something halfway interesting/plausible/realistic. There are lots of flaws, lots of hallucinations, lots of boring results to dismiss, which we won’t show, and lots of wholesale lifting of design elements that will be familiar to you, but it’s all in good fun. Let’s see what muscle cars the machine dreams about!

Midjourney AI-generated illustrations created by Dave Hunkins

Our first image was generated by prompting the AI to create a 1960s muscle car in a photorealistic style. A couple of things really stand out: the Midjourney AI has lifted the grille from a 1970 Dodge Challenger, taking some of the grille emblem script and mangling it into something unintelligible. Where “Dodge” normally is on the front of the hood is the whimsical name “ORON.” The Ford-like bodyside resembles an early ’70s Mustang notchback coupe or perhaps that of a 1970 Falcon/Torino. For a car builder who has a Challenger and a 1971-1973 Mustang donor car, this might not be out of the realm of possibility, and the proportions certainly work. The Olds 4-4-2-esque twin hoodscoop just makes this car all the more mysterious. Does Midjourney know it’s doing this? According to brother Dave, nope. It’s just making a billion simple binary yes/no decisions one adjacent pixel at a time. Is the result derivative? That’s an obvious “yes” to those of us in the know. A few more notes: all the images generated by Midjourney.com cannot be copywritten or used commercially, but editorial use is OK (what we’re doing here). The way we understand it is that these AI creations are supposed to be jumping-off points for additional creative exploration.

There was no such animal as a 1950s-era Chevy Camaro, but that didn’t stop Dave and I from asking Midjourney to design what one would’ve looked like! We asked for a photorealistic image, this time at sunset and at a low angle in a 16:9 aspect ratio. Here’s another interesting point we want to make: Each rendering is its own creation. There is no overarching design, so you can’t rotate it or change views to see how it looks from the rear. You can ask the AI to re-render your target with the same input prompts as a rear three-quarter view, for instance, but it’s not going to come out the same car—it’ll be completely different! Clearly in evidence are the 1954 Chevy grille and Tri-Five greenhouse, with a body that’s closer in proportion to a T-bird than an early Corvette. Did you pick up on the strange elliptical e-shaped quarter-panel scoop? Except for the iffy quarter-panel doodad, we like this one.

In the search of good-looking muscle car forms, our queries for ’60s-style muscle cars kept generating similar shapes with readily identifiable cues, but nothing groundbreaking. That’s when I asked Dave to add “in the style of a 1960s Italian sports car.” Since many of Detroit’s contemporary stylists looked to Italian brands like Ferrari, Lamborghini, and Alfa Romeo for inspiration, we reasoned, then so should we. One of the neat things Midjourney does is to generate four different ideas at once and here we’ve shown the two best images from our first initial query. You can then pick one or more of them for additional fine-tuning or chuck all of them and have the AI start over. You can also select specific parts of an image to re-render if you like most of it but want a different take on a specific zone of the image. (Midjourney often adds goofy wheels and odd protuberances that need reworking.) The image on the right almost looks as if the AI took some kind of cue from a 1969 Dodge Daytona or 1970 Plymouth Superbird, using the aerodynamic nosecone as a jumping-off point. These two are ludicrously sexy.

The revelation that we could have the AI design a car in a specific national style led us to try designing one in the style of Italian designer Giorgetto Giugiaro. If memory serves me correctly (I was, after all, on vacation) the prompt that yielded the illustration above was something along the lines of “1960s muscle car in the style of Giugiaro, low-angle, photorealistic, front three-quarter angle.” Along the way, we also noticed that asking for a 16:9 aspect ratio usually resulted in a black background and asking for one rendered photo-realistically at sunset would almost always make the car red. This image also produced another strange artifact that would become a regular sight: one headlight on one side and two on the opposite side! This image also appears to have doors for pop-up headlights in addition to its three recessed headlights. The shape is so comely, you hardly notice.

Like we said before, you can enter the same prompt into Midjourney over and over again, and each time it will spit out something different. As an example, we entered the same prompt as in the previous image for a Giugiaro-inspired 1960s muscle car and got this car as one of four on the second try. Once again, you can see some of the hallucination in the AI machine when you look at the license plate script, emblems, and other badges. One recurring problem was that the AI hasn’t identified five-spoke wheels as the dominant design type. We kept getting cars with four- and six-spoke wheels!

Trying to render an alternate-reality version of a car that does exist seems to be a non-starter, as you’ll always get an inexact but very close version of the real one, and it will be too similar to the original to be worthwhile. Every time we asked for the AI to create a muscle car in the style of another one—for example, “1960s muscle car in the style of a 1968 Dodge Charger”—we got a near-copy of the real car, a 1968 Dodge Charger. The real glory of AI here is to try for a style of car in an era that it didn’t exist in, like this “1980s-style Pontiac GTO.” At first glance, it’s pretty legit, but a closer look at the grille and bumper reveals some unresolved design problems. Like we said, AI is a jumping-off point, not a final destination. With more time, this one could’ve been refined to work out the problems.

About midway through our hour-long experiment, Dave and I decided to go back to a solution that had previously rendered good results: the “national” style. Since prompting “1960s muscle car in the style of an Italian sports car” worked so well, why not try another country known for its exemplary performance machinery, like Germany? This resulted in a nondescript but well-proportioned minimalistic coupe. Rather than try to refine this one into something more swoopy, we moved on to some other nationalities, but the take-away here is that the AI pretty much thinks German cars from the 1960s are austere-looking boxes, and that’s pretty much dead-on.

Why a Bulgarian 1960s muscle car, you ask? With many folks who know me it’s common practice to get as far away from me as possible, my brother being no exception. He lives in Bulgaria, so he wondered if a 1960s muscle car styled in the manner of a 1960s Bulgarian car would produce something better than one from Germany. We can totally see Natasha, the Bulgarian spy from Rocky and Bullwinkle, flitting around Sofia in this elegant machine when not trying to seduce Canadian Mounties. (Does anybody else see shades of a 1963 Pontiac Tempest here?) According to Dave, relatively few people in Bulgaria own and drive cars, and readily available stats back that up, with a recent survey saying about 396 out of 1,000 Bulgarians own cars.

It’s no secret that the first-generation Toyota Celica was inspired by some of the greatest American muscle car designs, so I figured, why not use the Celica as a jumping-off point for a new muscle car design? It’s a design that looks wholly like a muscle car (imagine it scaled up 15 percent) but without the blatant brand idiosyncrasies of Ford, GM, or Chrysler to sway the AI output. Nevertheless, the Celica’s grille and body lines are so strong I expected them to show up in the render, but when Dave hit the button they seem to have been discarded wholesale. What we got was arguably more intriguing: the profile of a Ford Maverick with the beak of a 1960s Buick Skylark. We’d guess that going down the Toyota Celica-styled path will at some point yield even better results when iterated further as a 1960s muscle car. Hey, at least Midjourney finally whipped up a decent set of five-spoke wheels!

Perhaps the most telling clue to the first-generation Camaro’s influence is what happens when you ask the AI to create a 1960s muscle car in the style of a 1960s Ferrari. Each time brother Dave hit the render button, something similar to a 1967-1969 Chevy Camaro was created, and this was without any prompt for “Chevy,” “Camaro,” or “red.” Apparently, Midjourney senses all Ferraris are red, and by extension, all muscle cars must look like early Camaros, provided you ask for something Ferrari-esque. If it’s any consolation, there’s a ton of American Motors AMX and Javelin influences in this AI-generated hallucination, and it all looks great, except for maybe the six-spoke wheels, two-foot-wide steering wheel, and asymmetrical hood bulges!

It seemed at this point as if there was enough raw material within the AI to cobble some AMC-like muscle cars, so that’s where Dave aimed his prompts next. Our impression of the first result was that it looked a lot like a 1963-1964 Ford Galaxie profile mixed with a 1964 Chevy Malibu grille, but there’s also plenty of 1963 Dodge Custom 880 in there as well. (We have no idea why Midjourney thinks AMCs have old, chalky paint!) This is when it occurred to me that the AI sometimes can’t discern between “cars” and “muscle cars,” choosing to draw its source image material from the body of all cars in a given make, year, or decade. (We can’t spot any styling reference to anything other than the standard AMC passenger cars of the era, when clearly the AMX, Javelin, Rebel Machine, Hurst S/C Rambler, and Matador Go-Machine are the standout AMC muscle cars that Midjourney should’ve been drawing from.) AI clearly needs more fine-tuning before it’s truly a threat to human creative efforts.

We’re going to leave you on a high note with one more AI-generated image created from the prompt “1960s Italian-inspired muscle car.” Time after time, the Italian influence turned the cool-factor dial the highest on Midjourney, and with every push of the button—even with the same prompt—cool junk just kept pouring out. In this last image, which looks more photorealistic than any of those we created, we’re seeing a lot of fever-dream references to things we love, like the first-generation Plymouth Barracuda, Chevy Corvair, 1970 Dodge Super Bee, Lamborghini Miura, and perhaps a dash of Alfa Romeo Montreal. It looks so cool, it’s scary!