I was perusing Facebook this morning. Not to brag, but I’m a member of a few diecast toy car collecting groups on Facebook. People post information about various Hot Wheels, Matchbox, Auto World, Johnny Lightning, and other toy-car brands. A lot of it involves people complaining about scalpers buying up all the new releases they want to buy.
The following image made me stop scrolling:
It’s an image of a car from Mattel’s Hot Wheels Premium line. These vehicles are made specifically for the adult collector. They feature both a metal body and base. The tires are rubber, not hard plastic like those on cheaper mainline Hot Wheels vehicles. They usually also feature a better paint job than the less expensive models.
This Hot Wheels Premium car depicts a 1974 Chevy Laguna from the 1981 movie Cannonball Run. The photo shows it hanging from a peg at Walmart. It made me want to run to Walmart and try to find it. I didn’t do that because it’s not real. It was created with artificial intelligence (AI).
It’s a Fake!
I realized it was fake because of how nice it looked. Everything about it is perfect in every way. Almost every toy diecast vehicle hanging from a peg in a retail environment has some kind of flaw in its packaging. Some are major, while others are very minor. If you look hard enough, you’ll always find something that makes the packaging look imperfect.
The packaging on this Hot Wheels vehicle is just too perfect.
The same applies to the photo itself. I’ve seen a lot of pics taken of diecast at various retail stores. This photo is just a little too perfect.
Additionally, I knew this was fake because if this were in Mattel’s pipeline, I would have heard about it long before someone found it hanging from a peg at Walmart.
AI-created images are making the Internet, especially Facebook, a more terrible place. The better and more realistic AI-generated images become, the worse the Internet becomes.
Artificial Intelligence Has a Higher Priority than Humanity
Eventually, it will not matter. At some point in the future, a tech oligarch worth more than a trillion dollars will successfully divert water, electricity, and other vital resources from humans to AI data centers. They may even have AI do it for them.
The demand for RAM and solid-state hard drives in data centers has driven prices skyward. Estimates indicate that 70% of the high-end chips manufactured in 2026 will go directly to data centers. This shortage will cause consumer electronics prices to rise sharply. AI data centers are more important than humans.
In Conclusion
When the tech oligarchs band together and successfully divert all water and electricity to AI data centers, we won’t worry about fake pics of Hot Wheels toys on Facebook. Humans will be too busy fighting each other over puddles of contaminated rainwater.
Buy the book, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All