Quite frankly, writing about AI in an auction listing makes a nice change from some of the other things we've been talking about recently. We've had so many questions around bidding and market manipulation at various auction houses, so give me a suspicious photograph and a bunch of Porsche people trying to work out what's going on and I'm very happy.

And this one became quite the little detective story.

Earlier this year we had that Cadillac on BaT with the rather wonderful cobblestone floor that didn't actually exist. But of course none of this really started with AI. Photos have been edited for years. The difference now is that AI has made it ridiculously easy for absolutely anyone to do it, and increasingly our phones are doing some of the work for us whether we've asked them to or not.

Which brings us to this 1978 Porsche 930 Turbo that sold for $101,010. It's a genuinely interesting car in its own right, having been in the same family for 36 years and showing just 38,000 miles, although it hadn't been driven for roughly 13 years. But towards the end of the auction, it was the photos that suddenly became the story.

People started noticing things. The Turbo script in one photograph looked garbled. A driver's seat appeared different between photos. A rear wiper seemed to disappear. Someone couldn't find the third brake light. Another thought the interior colour and door jamb had changed. Before long the obvious question arrived: had some of these photographs been doctored using AI?

The seller was adamant they hadn't. She'd taken the photographs herself and suggested shadows, sunlight and angles might explain what people were seeing. Someone else made a pretty interesting point that modern phones are doing so much processing to photographs now that it's perfectly possible for something strange to appear without the person taking the picture deliberately changing anything.

PCarMarket then did exactly what you'd hope a platform would do. They spoke with the seller, extended the auction by 30 minutes and asked for a fresh walkaround video. She went out, filmed the car and uploaded it. Whatever was causing the strange photographs, it doesn't appear this was someone trying to pass AI-generated images off as the real thing. The auction carried on and eventually finished at $101,010.

But whether AI was actually involved in this particular auction almost isn't the point. This is going to become a bigger issue, and I think the auction platforms, certainly the biggest ones, should get ahead of it now rather than waiting until something goes badly wrong.

From a certain date, every photograph uploaded to an auction should automatically be run through software checking for AI generation and manipulation. The technology already exists. Sightengine, for example, is one of the better-known companies doing this and offers tools specifically designed to detect AI-generated and manipulated images at scale.

That doesn't mean automatically rejecting every photograph that gets flagged. There could be a perfectly innocent explanation. Maybe someone removed a number plate, cleaned something distracting out of the background or made another harmless edit. The detection software itself isn't infallible either.

But if something gets flagged, check it. Ask the seller. And if an image has been materially altered, put a disclosure next to it so bidders know.

To me, that should become standard practice. Yes, there's a cost. It's another piece of software, another process and another thing for the platforms to manage. And perhaps today this is still a relatively small problem.

But that's precisely why I'd like to see them doing it now. Why wait until it becomes a big problem?

We're talking about platforms where people regularly spend tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, and more than ocassionaly millions, on cars they may never have seen in person. The photographs are a fundamental part of what the buyer is relying upon. Checking that those photographs haven't been materially manipulated doesn't seem like some extravagant extra layer of protection to me. Increasingly it feels like something that should simply be part of running an online auction.

And there's a huge positive for the platforms that move first. Imagine one of the major players emailing its entire community tomorrow and saying that from September 1 every photograph submitted to an auction will automatically be screened for AI manipulation, anything questionable will be reviewed and materially edited images will be disclosed.

I'd love that. They're not reacting to a scandal. They're not explaining how something got through. They're telling the market they've seen where this is going and have decided to get ahead of it.

That's a fantastic trust signal. In fact, as this technology becomes cheaper and easier to implement, I think the opposite starts becoming true. If the major platforms aren't doing anything to verify images, eventually I'm going to start wondering why not.

I'm not suggesting we have some enormous AI-photo crisis today. We don't. But surely that's the best time to put something in place, rather than after someone buys a very expensive car based partly on photographs that turn out not to represent what was actually there.

Then there's video. This Porsche auction was a great example of why I think video is going to become even more important with the rise of AI. People questioned the photographs, the platform asked for a fresh walkaround, the seller went outside and filmed the actual car. Suddenly everyone had something much harder to argue about.

Video obviously isn't going to remain immune from AI forever either, but right now a fresh walkaround can answer an awful lot of questions very quickly. If something gets flagged in a photograph, asking the seller for a new video showing that exact area seems like a pretty sensible second layer of verification.

And I wouldn't underestimate the crowd either. Trying to sneak something past a knowledgeable auction audience isn't as easy as it might seem. These are people who will notice that a rear wiper appears to have vanished or that a seat doesn't look quite right. Sometimes they'll be wrong, as appears to have been the case here, but they'll ask the question.

I suspect they're going to be asking it a lot more often. AI hasn't created photo manipulation. What it's done is put incredibly powerful photo manipulation tools into everybody's hands and made them almost effortless to use.

So yes, perhaps today it's a small problem. That's exactly when the platforms should deal with it.

The technology for altering the photographs has arrived. There's already technology available to help check them. For me, particularly with the largest online auction platforms, being proactive here should very quickly become standard practice.

What do you think?

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Yesterday I said I'd be keeping an eye on what happens online while seemingly half the car world is in Monterey, and it hasn't taken long for something interesting to pop up.

This 2022 Porsche 718 Spyder only went live on BaT this morning and I'm already interested to see where it goes. I'm not particularly bothered about the bidding right now because there are still seven days left, but the car itself and some of the discussion already happening around it caught my attention.

It's one of just 39 built with the 000 Package, created with 000 Magazine and Porsche Exclusive, and this one is PTS Slate Gray over Ascot Brown and Black leather. The original sticker was $181,630, including nearly $49,000 of Sonderwunsch options, which is a fairly ridiculous amount of money to spend specifying a 718, but then you look at the interior and I kind of get it. I really like this combination.

What makes it more interesting is that the comments have already turned into a debate about this versus the Spyder RS. One person thinks it should bring RS money, another thinks it should actually bring more because this has the six-speed manual, while someone who has owned both sides of the equation quite rightly points out that the RS has that GT engine, which is a pretty compelling argument in the other direction.

And I think that's what makes this one fun to watch. If you had the choice, which would you actually want? The much rarer 000 Spyder, beautifully specced and with three pedals, or the Spyder RS with that engine? I'm not sure there's a wrong answer and I'm not even sure which one I'd take.

I also like the fact this one has 9,000 miles. That's hardly high mileage, but at least somebody has actually used it. We've seen enough special modern Porsches with tiny mileage to know that isn't always the case, so seeing something this rare that's actually been driven makes me like it a little more.

Apparently there hasn't been another 000 Spyder publicly offered since 2024, so we don't get many opportunities to see what the market thinks of one. I'm certainly not going to predict where it'll finish, especially after everything we discussed about valuations yesterday, but I'll definitely be watching.

And as for Car Week taking everyone's attention away from the online auctions, so far at least, there still seems to be plenty going on.

I wrote about The MB Market last week and how much I like the direction they're heading in, and then this turns up.

A 1989 Mercedes-Benz 560SEC AMG Widebody, and quite frankly, just look at it. Black Pearl Metallic, black leather, those enormous arches and the 17-inch O.Z. Aero IIIs. I know looks are subjective, but this thing just pops, and clearly I'm not the only one who thinks so because bidding is already at $129,388 with six days still to go.

Of course at this sort of money you need a bit more than good looks, and there's plenty to get stuck into here. It's an Italian-market car reportedly converted by AMG Germany in period, with stamped AMG bodywork, AMG suspension, AMG cluster, M40 steering wheel, Tri-Y headers and the high-compression Euro 5.5-liter V8. The engine was completely rebuilt in 2020 and Stuttgart Steel has since spent months going through the car and sorting a long list of mechanical bits.

I also love that the seller bought it sight unseen and basically introduced himself to the car by taking it on a near 400-mile rally to Monterey. No gentle 20-mile shakedown around the neighborhood, straight into a 400-mile rally. Brilliant.

Now, there is one thing I'd certainly want to understand if I was bidding. There isn't factory documentation confirming the AMG conversion. The seller has managed to track down a previous owner in Lebanon who says the car arrived there in 1991 and that the original Italian owner sent it back to AMG Germany for the Widebody conversion, which certainly adds to the story, but it's still not the same as having the paperwork.

There's even a little mystery around the "G.F." initials on the AMG cluster and a theory that the original owner could have been Giorgio Falck. Again, nobody is claiming that's fact, but I imagine someone is going to have a lot of fun trying to work that one out.

Anyway, there are still six days left and two bidders have already taken this beyond $125k, so plenty of time for things to change. But this is exactly the sort of car I love seeing appear on a specialist platform.

I'm definitely coming back to this one next week.

I really do try to give you a decent mix of cars in TDV every day. There are only so many Porsches, Ferraris and Mercedes I can throw at you before it all starts getting a bit boring, and there are far too many interesting cars out there to spend every morning talking about the same few marques.

But occasionally I have to break my own rule, and after already featuring the 718 Spyder above, I'm giving you another Porsche. At least we had the stunning Mercedes in between.

The reason is pretty simple. Just look at it.

This is a 2024 Carrera T in Ruby Star Neo and I absolutely love it. I'm normally looking for the story behind a car, something unusual in the history, an interesting discussion in the comments or some reason why an auction might surprise us. This one didn't need any of that to get my attention. It just jumped off the page.

And the more I looked, the more I liked it. It's a Carrera T with the seven-speed manual, rear-wheel drive and 16,600 miles, so somebody has actually gone out and enjoyed it rather than worrying about keeping the odometer frozen. There are more than 300 photos in the listing and Ruby Star Neo seems to work from pretty much every angle. Judging by the comments, I'm certainly not alone in thinking that.

The seller has also been very open in the comments about the damage entry showing on the Carfax, which he believes is incorrect and is currently disputing, as well as showing the minor front bumper scuff that was repaired under the previous ownership. I always like seeing things addressed head-on in an auction rather than leaving bidders guessing.

But really, I'm not trying to find some clever reason to feature this one.

We've already got a rather special Porsche above and there were plenty of other cars I could have put here instead, but I kept coming back to this one. Great colour, manual gearbox, plenty of miles left to enjoy and a spec that just works for me.

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