Michigan Residents took to social media on Wednesday to express their outrage and disappointment and express excitement over an expensive glamor project built in honor of Detroit Host the upcoming NFL Draft. People felt like they were promised a big “Hollywood” sign overlooking Detroit’s busiest highway. What we got were eight-foot-tall green letters on two-foot-tall concrete bases in the southwest part of the city. However, the residents only really have themselves to blame for their disappointment after falling for AI-generated images that could never have worked in real life.
It’s unclear where the original AI-generated image even came from, but one thing is certain: it went viral in the Motor City. Assumptions were made, and we all know what assumptions do (it makes you and me an ass). Speaking of asses, Michigan Senate Republicans took to Twitter/X to blame the state’s Democrats, which is as stupid as thinking AI-generated characters would ever appear in real life:
Okay, so first of all – this AI image is so obviously and painfully fake. For example, look at the strange layout of the highway. Does this look like something a professional designer would do? On the city’s highways themselves, there are no grassy medians and no three-way highways at all. Not to mention, as anyone familiar with Detroit’s highways knows, the accommodation would never have worked.
In the AI image, the sign also appears to be posted along I-75, where in reality the highway is already sunken and has high concrete walls on both sides, extremely steep grassy embankments, or the highway juts out over cross streets and other highways, the further you come from the city center. Along this highway are factories, warehouses, neighborhoods, and other buildings that aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. There are no large green spaces or embankments near the Renaissance Center that would accommodate a sign of this size in such a location, not to mention the obvious construction and road closures that would have been necessary to install a huge sign. The letters on the Hollywood sign are 30 feet tall. The construction of a similar sign along one of the city’s busiest highways would have been noticeable months before the NFL draft came to town in April of this year.
The city simply announced the construction of this sign and a few other improvements. The officials didn’t make any grandiose promises, but they did make a shady AI image.
The actual sign was placed along I-94 in southwest Detroit, fairly close to where trucks cross the Ambassador Bridge into and out of Canada. The 10 foot long green letters are fine! We probably do I could have put that $400,000 to better usebut it’s certainly not the worst thing that’s ever happened to this city (not by a long shot).
Detroiters are used to disappointment at this point. Consider the great promises of public transit with streetcars that evaporated into a single private streetcar line that runs just 3.3 miles along Woodward Avenue. Or the promised demolition of I-375—the shortest and most pointless highway in the United States—that would give the streets back to the people and honor the thriving black neighborhood that was destroyed for its construction. The actual plan calls for just a busy eight-lane road – basically just a highway, but now with crosswalks and benches.
Yes, disappointments abound in Detroit, but this time it’s our own fault.