Tyco Concept Cars

Using the latest Artificial Intelligence Technology

This week I've been thinking... what if Tyco still existed today?

What kind of designs might we expect, and what would the artwork be like?

Well wonder no further!

Thanks to the latest in Artificial Intelligence Technology (Stable Diffusion by stablity.ai), I was able to glimpse at what might have been.

Using this software, we're able to "train" it on a selection of specially modified Tyco product artwork from the 1980s-1990s, so that it could "learn" how to paint like Ken Smith, and what the subject matter (R/C cars) typically looked like.

This isn't easy, and required an absolute beast of a computer GPU, the Nvidia GeForce 3090 RTX 24GB, one of the most powerful on the market today, on loan from a friend.

Then, once it's understood all that artwork...

I ask it to make me some more!

The results?

I call this the Tyco 9.6v Turbo PITBULL.

And sure, it's far from perfect. This AI doesn't understand text very well yet, but it mimics the 80s-90s product artwork well.

Here's some more.

The Tyco Beach Truggy, like a miniature Bandit.

The Formula Turbo, like a low-riding Turbo Hopper with Formula One instinct.

The two images above demonstrate that the AI has learned Ken Smith's "white streaks" he often added to wheels to show the speed and energy, evident on the Turbo Hopper, Bandit, and other popular car packaging.

I'll leave you with a quick look at some early attempts of mine that demonstrate how the AI can succeed, but more often fail in it's understanding of geometry and what goes where. Nevertheless, quite interesting I'm sure you'll agree!

What four cars do you think inspired these images? Leave a comment below.