Opinion: Viral Formula 1 AI videos freak me out

AI. Damn. Who else is tired of hearing about it? Raise a hand. That wasn’t rhetorical. I would love to know that y’all reading this actually raise your hands, because even through this digital mire, we humans can connect while our programmed overlords are powerless in that arena. As we watch AI videos sweep across the internet like a tarp over a patch of grass you want to kill, many of us are getting a sense that the uncanny valley we find ourselves treading isn’t offering us what sci-fi movies always promised. After this viral AI video of the F1 drivers dancing, fighting Kung-Fu, and rapping whatever else has made its rounds, shouldn’t we be asking ourselves one question: “Why?” 

AI F1videos

I barely have well-formed thoughts on AI. We are, many of us at least, stuck in a reaction loop these days, and I think it's actually pretty tough to be online with any regularity and also keep this in check. 

Everything is a trigger, and many different people, for many different reasons, are working hard to push us into fast, unthoughtful takes on everything. AI might be one of the finest examples of this in quite some time. 

Higgsfield AI

Take these newest viral AI clips from- actually, I’d rather not share the clips or the profiles. This isn’t to be a hater, but more in an effort not to feed the AI feedback loop. What’s important to know is that these viral AI renderings were not created or distributed by either of the racing drivers or Ferrari, but by various people/profiles who decided to prompt AI to create images of Lewis Hamilton and Charles Leclerc fighting like Neo and Morpheus in the first Matrix training sequence, rapping in the studio, and even one of George Russel replacing Lil Yachty in his iconic stage entrance from the 2021 Lyrical Lemonade Summer Smash—Le sigh. 

Why? This is what I can’t help but beg of the people behind the internet. Why would we take some objective monsters of a pinnacle series in a sport like F1, and imagine them pantomiming some other iconic moments? What’s the goal? I’m truly not asking these questions with a preloaded, cynical retort ready to fire. I want to know why. Is it just for fun? Is there a financial gain for whoever “created” the clips? Or does it offer the pseudo-creators some errant feeling of creativity? I know this sounds judgmental, and I guess it is, but I am genuinely curious. 

These AI videos are particularly puzzling given the nature of the folks in them. These are a tiny selection of an already tiny selection of some of the best racing drivers in the world. An elite class by all measures. So why are we compelled to this fictionalization even in the face of greatness?

AI isn’t our savior; it’s just a hammer

I think AI has its merits. Like a hammer, for some problems, LLMs and other pedestrian forms of AI are tools that can really help solve certain problems or make an otherwise tedious task a bit less so. Again, I’m not just a hater. 

Higgsfield AI

Despite its value as a tool, AI’s place in entertainment, art, and other culturally and inherently human endeavors should, at a minimum, hit us in the scruples. Giving our creativity and admiration over to something so lifeless and false should give us real pause. 

Why is this stuff being pushed here? Who gains from it? Based on the comments section of these AI F1 videos, it would seem a lot of people believe they are benefiting. “It’s giving me life,” one Instagram commenter said. I understand the colloquialism or whatever, but still, “giving me life” is a particularly arresting comment given what’s actually on screen here. Life? No. Death isn’t the opposite of life; whatever AI is, is. 

As far as AI applies to things like motorsport, I think it can only stand to threaten what is so beloved about the sport; a human, vulnerable and imperfect, is trying to master the foundational, elemental forces behind physics like gravity and inertia with a machine that is capable of incredible things, but only if a person can make the correct inputs at the correct times, quickly enough to work with these primordial forces, does the whole dance work. 

I know these videos are silly throwaway nothing, but that’s kind of the point. Why do people ask the computers to make them? What’s the point? And do we think the closer we get to making these false videos better will somehow add to our experience watching the race? 

AI is already being used in motorsport

The Abu Dhabi Autonomous Racing League, known as A2RL, is real. Teams from around the world fill the field with identical cars with no human driver. The competition is happening between competing lines of code. The goblins running the show here insist the point of this nonsense is to develop better AI models, not replace human drivers. Ok, but again, why? Develop better AI F1 racing models for what?

“I like to see A2RL as nothing different from a testbed for these kinds of technologies,” said Alessandro Tucci, executive director of the House of Grand Challenges at Aspire, the Abu Dhabi government research agency that runs the series. He said the goal was to apply it to real-world scenarios like “moving goods and logistics, or the future of our streets and cities, with the ambition to become a new competition — a complementary new competition that goes close in parallel to the others.”

Abu Dhabi Autonomous Racing League

I’m no expert on computers, AI, coding, or even F1 cars, but I have, like many of you, been practicing and studying up on being a human for a long time, and while I don’t know much, I do know the computers aren't what we need to not replace people. Pushing technology might make me nervous, but I recognize the value. But for an industry that “doesn’t want to replace humans,” as they so often beg us to believe, these AI developers sure do a lot of human replacing. 

“Your connection, my connection, the fans’ connection (to racing) is the fact that you have a human being pushing themselves above and beyond, and it’s married with a machine at the same time,” James Vowles, the Williams F1 team principal, told The Athletic. “That’s the humanization of the sport. I think as AI continues to grow, you’re going to want that more and more.”

I’m not asking you to believe or trust me on AI. I know nothing. I am, however, asking that we just hold our scruples closely, open our eyes, pay attention to the bigger picture, and remain curious about who gains what from this whole thing. The silly videos of Lewis and Leclare tangled in a Kung-Fu duel or rapping in the studio or whatever might be innocuous. Still, I can’t help but try to zoom out, always, eventually getting snagged on the thorns of “why?”