In the business of selling cars, the image is everything. It is the digital handshake. In a digital-first market, trust is built on what the customer sees.
For decades, the industry relied on physical photography: authentic, but slow, expensive, and operationally heavy. Today, many are tempted by the promise of Generative AI: instant, infinite, and “free”.
But “free” is a mirage. While GenAI offers speed and convenience, it introduces legal and commercial risk that much of the automotive industry is underestimating.
We are seeing a rush to adopt technology that builds brand equity on unstable ground. This creates a double problem: risk at the point of creation and risk at the point of ownership.
Generative AI systems do not create; they synthesise. To generate a convincing image of a specific car model, they must first be trained on vast numbers of existing images.
In many cases, that training data has been scraped from the open web. Often without permission, licence, or compensation.
That is the structural flaw at the heart of generic GenAI. When a business uses these models to create marketing assets, it may be building campaigns on unauthorised source material.
As lawsuits from rights holders move through the courts, what once felt like a harmless shortcut is becoming a compliance risk for professional organisations.
Images generated solely by AI are unlikely to be protected by copyright and may effectively sit in the public domain. The business impact is simple. You launch a campaign using AI-generated imagery. A competitor copies it. Your ability to challenge that use is limited because you do not own the image.
There is also brand risk. Cars are not generic objects. When AI “hallucinates” a vehicle, proportions shift, details blur, and badges distort. That erosion of accuracy undermines trust and, by extension, brand value.
The real choice is not between photography and generic AI. There is a third path: data-driven image creation built from authorised engineering sources such as CAD data.
This approach delivers scale and automation while preserving provenance, licensing, and ownership from source to output.
Building your brand on “free” AI images is like driving without insurance. It may save money today, but one incident can cost far more than it ever saved.
Martijn Versteegen is CEO at IMAGIN.studio
