It's the year 2023. You log in to your local online used car listings expecting the usual mix of project cars in need of help, surplus hoverjeeps left over from the galactic war, and those newfangled organic hybrids that you're not quite sure about yet. Then you spot it. It looks to be missing its wings, the rotator assembly for the tail section is likely busted, and there's a good deal of surface rust all over, but there's no mistaking that classic profile of a 1976 Mohishwa JRR4 flying car. It's nestled among some weeds out behind somebody's shop and you can probably talk the seller down by a grand or two...

If all of the above sounds like science fiction, it is. But a number of people saw just that situation play out last month and appeared to genuinely believe it to be fact, thanks to one digital artist who thought he'd see how convincing the new generations of artificial intelligence (AI) art generators can be and who caused some havoc in the process.

"We are at a point in history where you can no longer trust photographs or video, or even written words," Aaron Lea said in an interview regarding the Mohishwa.

Lea had been using a tool called Midjourney, which was released in July of last year and has been used to create a number of convincing or semi-convincing images using just natural language descriptions as inputs. It's one of a number of AI tools - including DALL-E and Chat GPT - that have made headlines recently for their advanced language processing abilities and for generating billions of dollars of investment in Silicon Valley. While seemingly sentient to some users, at their most basic they are programs that are trained on vast datasets to associate words with images or with other words and then make educated guesses at what words or images come next, then refine their accuracy via user feedback.

While Midjourney seemed an incredible step forward to Lea and returned more realistic results than prior AI image generators, he wanted to see how convincing Midjourney-generated images would be in a real-life scenario "as a social and technological experiment, as well as for my own entertainment."

Specifically, he'd used Midjourney to create a series of "impossible and nonexistent ideas" and "several variations of futuristic technology existing in the past." Rusty, crusty flying cars were a favorite of his; he'd created a whole series of them, many of which ended up looking like Gerry Anderson creations left out in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. But for the experiment to work, he couldn't just share the image with friends and family who already knew what he was up to and who could thus not be impartial when he quizzed them about the believability of the images. Instead, he needed test subjects out in the wild who didn't already know the images they were seeing were fake and whose responses could be somehow quantified. So he posted the Mohishwa JRR4 to Facebook Marketplace with a made-up backstory about it being "one of the first consumer level flying cars, only released in Japan" with missing wings and with limited parts availability.

The Mohishwa JRR4 AI-generated image. Source: Aaron LeaThe Mohishwa JRR4 AI-generated image. Source: Aaron Lea

The listing almost immediately went viral. He reported that it generated more than 25,000 views and 1,000 shares. On Reddit, at least a few people appeared to genuinely believe the flying car was real and that they had the opportunity to score something unique.

"I got flooded with hundreds of responses, including many from older mechanics," Lea said. "People wanted more pics, wanted info, wanted to come see it, people even started multiple threads on several websites discussing reverse engineering and machining or 3D printing the necessary parts. Some wanted to make me cash offers unseen. This was absolutely hilarious to me."

It wasn't all that hilarious to Facebook's moderators, however. The next day he found himself locked out of his Facebook account and banned from Marketplace. Due to the prevalence of scams on the platform, it has strict policies in place against posting cars that don't exist, though those policies typically target listings that use photos scraped from elsewhere on the Internet and not AI-generated images.

Source: Aaron LeaSource: Aaron Lea

Lea said that after an appeal, he was reinstated to Facebook, "but this also brought to light how scary this tool could be if used for fraud. This was something I did myself, on a whim, in under 20 minutes. In a world of 8 billion people, the number of people who could do something similar or worse and who would have nefarious intent is incalculable."

Indeed, Midjourney's creators discontinued the free trial version of its software last week after a number of fake images created with the software went viral or circulated as actual news. PetaPixel reported that AI-generated images were even used to scam one woman out of hundreds of thousands of dollars. "Due to a combination of extraordinary demand and trial abuse we are temporarily disabling free trials until we have our next improvements to the system deployed," Midjourney creator David Holz wrote.

A related Aaron Lea AI-generated image depicts a fake moon landing. Source: Aaron LeaA related Aaron Lea AI-generated image depicts a fake moon landing. Source: Aaron Lea

In the meantime, Lea cautioned to use common sense when using images found online to make financial decisions. "If something seems too good to be true, it probably is," he said.

The same goes for the Mohishwa JRR4, the latest in a long line of flying cars that never left the ground.


Editor's note: This article originally appeared on Hemmings Motor News.