Earlier today, I was talking about V4 engines in motorcycles, and I made a quick Google search: “Motorcycle V4 engines 2025.” I was just looking to confirm what I already knew, that the Aprilia RSV4 and Ducati Panigale V4 are the only production sportbikes to use that engine layout, but Google informed me of something else: A revived Yamaha VMAX, currently for sale in the year of our lord 2025.
This is, of course, not true. Yamaha hasn’t made the VMAX since 2020, and as far as anyone can tell there are no plans to bring it back. So where did Google get the idea that this bike was currently on the market? Well, luckily, the AI credits its source: An AI-generated, AI-voiced video on an all-AI YouTube channel, using nonsensical AI imagery to claim a new VMAX is on the way. The snake is eating its own AI-generated tail.
The internet is getting fundamentally broken
The cited video is from a channel called Bike Culture Hub — a channel I will not be linking — which has a very rote program for its videos. There’s some AI-generated still imagery of an imagined bike overlaid with an AI voice that lists off facts and figured about the motorcycle. The stats are nonsensical, the voice often gets things as simple as the name of the motorcycle wrong, and — it cannot be emphasized enough — none of the motorcycles it discusses are real. On the occasion the channel discusses a current motorcycle, it’ll talk about model-year updates that a generative AI has hallucinated.
To any observer who knows the first thing about the bikes in question — or bikes in general — anything on these AI-generated YouTube channels is clear garbage with no bearing on reality. But Google, the company once known for finding accurate results as fast as possible, now relies on an AI that has no concept of “truth” — just repeating words it sees used in proximity to each other, like your phone keyboard’s autocomplete or a particularly dumb parrot. As this AI tech improves in its ability to mimic reality, while still remaining fundamentally incapable of differentiating fact from fiction, channels like Bike Culture Hub will only get more convincing. Our human ability to locate facts online will be compromised, and “people at dealerships asking for features that don’t exist” is about the best possible outcome. It could get far worse from there.