This AI Filter Makes Your Car Look Like It’s in a Retro Video Game

As a child of the ’90s, I love a good, blocky, low-poly, retro video game car. The sharper the seams and the crunchier the textures, the better. That’s why, when my friend Caleb turned me onto a TikTok filter that transforms any car into a 30-year-old digital version of itself, you know my interest was instantly piqued. As a connoisseur of the art form, I took matters into my own hands and redownloaded TikTok to see what it could do.

A couple of things first, before we get started. I really don’t like TikTok, and I stopped using it years ago. The algorithm creeps me out, the user interface is confounding, and now that I’m well into my 30s, the app mostly serves as a constant reminder that my sense of humor is out of touch. But before this little experiment, I’d never tried to make a TikTok.

[Editor’s Note: TikTok stinks! It’s the worst! Please don’t send me angry emails! -CJ]

Now that I have, I hate the app even more! Editing confused the hell out of me, and each time I added a photo of a car to the timeline to retro-ify, it kept insisting on applying some horrendous yogurt commercial jingle to the mix. I deleted the royalty-free muzak over and over again, only to find that the app was recording ambient audio from my iPhone’s microphone the entire time. At this point I was seconds from deliberately testing the limits of Apple’s shatter-proof glass until I had the idea to toss in a much better soundtrack—one I believe a certain contingent of our audience might enjoy.

Frustrations aside, here I used a filter called “Retro Game,” the icon for which is the face of a guy that could’ve been pulled from a Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, with the word “AI” pasted in the corner, as is customary. You select the filter and an image to apply it to, wait for the effect to load, and then watch a line move horizontally across the screen revealing a nostalgic masterpiece.

OK—”masterpiece” is obviously laying it on a bit thick. I wouldn’t say this filter created anything I liked, though I was fascinated by some of its interpretations. In the minute-long video below (which I uploaded to YouTube—you’re welcome), you can see what it does to a small number of shots I’ve taken of random cars over the last few years. Some of the cars are from the ’80s and ’90s and, just as you’d assume, they fit the blocky theme well. So it’s little surprise that a Lancia Delta Integrale pretty much carves the exact same profile before and after. However, the neural network behind the magic saw fit to replace the Delta’s four sealed-beam round headlights with a pair of rectangular ones.

From there, it does a decent job of creating the sort of model of a Mk II Ford GT40 I might’ve expected to see in an early PS1 racing game; turns my GR Corolla into a Scion that never existed; and makes a McLaren Artura into a supercar I’m sure I blew up in GTA IV.

Yeah, Grand Theft Auto comes up a lot here, because if I had to compare the filter’s output to one gaming franchise in particular, nothing else would come close. I mean, the Porsche 993 at the end there is a dead ringer for a retro Pfister Comet. I’m not sure whether that says something positive about this AI or negative about Rockstar’s “parodies” of popular enthusiast cars, but either way, it all fits together.

Otherwise, the filter changes effectively nothing about the Plymouth Superbird I saw at Philly’s Simeone Museum, nor does it take many liberties with a Ferrari F40. The most surprising result, in my opinion, is what it does to a Shelby Daytona Coupe. The algorithm is arguably even worse at dealing with curvy vintage cars than anything modern, so the priceless GT racer becomes what I can only describe as a front-engined Alpine A310. Honestly, it kinda hits.

It doesn’t seem like this filter was designed just for cars, even though I’ve seen it portrayed as such by some TikTokers. You’ll notice that it has no idea what to make of some of the Simeone’s motorsports exhibits, so it effectively turns everything behind the “Hippie” Porsche 917 LH into the side of a castle. It also likes to make every race car wear some garbled version of the number 2. It’s stuff like this that makes generative AI vaguely unsettling and crappy to me, so now that I’ve investigated this phenomenon, excuse me as I return to never using TikTok again.

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