Once upon a time, I was on the way to a major sporting event with a good friend of mine in his car. (What’s the difference between a BMW full of lawyers and a porcupine? With the porcupine, the pricks are on the outside!) When we happened upon what seemed to me to be an impossibly small parking space open on the street, he skillfully backed right in.

Not, however, without the slightest jolt when we gently tapped the vehicle behind us. Then there was another tiny impact against the car in front of us when he pulled forward to even out. “Bumpers are for bumping,” my friend said matter-of-factly.

Coming, as I do, from a part of the world where there is typically space to leave several car-lengths between vehicles in a parking lot, and where many drivers view the slightest scratch to the treasured vehicles from which they derive their entire personalities as a murderable offense, this “bumpers are for bumping” philosophy caused me to momentarily panic. I looked, though, as closely as I could at all three vehicles, hopefully without letting my friend catch me being that uncool. I couldn’t make out even the slightest amount of damage to any of them.

Since my preconceptions were challenged on this fateful day many years ago, I have continued to mellow out on minor, purely cosmetic damage to motor vehicles. If you treat every ding and dent to the skin of an object you’re going to be driving around outside in all kinds of weather at 70 miles per hour like it is the vilest insult to your beloved mother, I just don’t think we are going to be friends.

Compared to my evolution on this subject, the rental car company Hertz has decided to go in the opposite direction. Instead of a human person taking three seconds to walk around the car when you return it in order to spot any glaringly obvious problems, Hertz is now running its returned vehicles (at least at its airport locations) through an artificial intelligence hardware and software system called UVeye.

UVeye’s damage scanning system looks a bit like the entrance to an automated car wash, except instead of dousing your car with a delightful medley of multicolored solutions, it bathes your car in light that can detect imperfections invisible to the human eye. Reports are rampant of Hertz customers being automatically charged hundreds of dollars for damage allegedly discovered by UVeye that is trivial, non-existent, or predated their rental. When rental customers have tried to contest these charges, they faced the challenges we have all become accustomed to of needing both the patience of Job and the luck of the Irish to ever reach an actual human being capable of doing something to address the issue.

For now, you can mostly prevent the AI nanny state from charging you for using your bumper for bumping if you give your business to one of the other major domestic rental car companies. That being said, other car rental companies are reportedly beginning to invest in implementing similar technologies. Soon, we might all simply be stuck with another dystopian layer built in to the already unpleasant task of renting a car while traveling.

Car rental companies are far from the only businesses to enjoy the power imbalance of holding all the informational cards when using AI to accuse customers of causing damage to property they no longer have access to. For instance, a London-based academic recently renting an apartment in Manhattan through Airbnb was stunned to discover when she got home that she was being charged the equivalent of more than $15,000 for damage she supposedly caused to the premises. After Herculean efforts with customer service in pointing out that several images from the host allegedly showing the damage were inconsistent with one another and had apparently been altered by AI, Airbnb not only eventually dropped the additional charges but also refunded her for her entire stay. The host, meanwhile, was given a warning for violating Airbnb’s terms. His listing for the apartment remains live on the site.

Of course, customers can be AI cheaters too. Surely there are many examples out there of consumers using artificial intelligence to try to fake evidence of a bad stay, a faulty product, etc. in order to get something of value for free.

Still, even as AI becomes increasingly affordable and accessible, companies that have themselves outsourced so much internal judgment and decision-making to machines will always have the advantage. A corporation rarely has to listen to an individual calling in to try to rectify something, and the big ones can afford to alienate a lot of us (especially if all their competitors are employing similar business practices) before they see any consequences in their bottom lines.

Completely faked images or videos are one thing. I suppose short of all of us becoming AI-debunking experts, we are just going to have to find ways to live in a world where you really can’t believe a lot of what you see with your own eyes. When it comes to shit like UVeye, though, can we not just all agree to pull the plug?

Renting out cars could be profitable as a business long before UVeye came along. UVeye does not improve the customer experience, but rather annoys and alarms consumers. Let’s say it could detect some microscopic dimpling in a “bumpers are for bumping” scenario — is that really a valid thing to charge a customer for anyway if no unaided human could detect it?

Even if UVeye makes Hertz a little more money, it is not a reasonable trade-off for what it takes away from the car rental experience for the traveler. Perhaps executives somewhere at some point will realize that using AI to more efficiently screw their own customers is not a good long-term recipe for success.

Jonathan Wolf is a civil litigator and author of Your Debt-Free JD (affiliate link). He has taught legal writing, written for a wide variety of publications, and made it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.

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