Shaming Electrek on Their AI Bullshit

Shaming Electrek On Their AI Bullshit

Jul 20, 2026 • Extra Ordinary

I’m supposed to be studying for a rather technical job interview I have tomorrow (context), but then I saw this article from Electrek: “Survey Sunday: is Slate Auto’s affordable electric truck going to make it?” I’m personally very excited about Slate Auto — I like sedans, but boy is their design philosophy right up my alley, so I’m rooting for their success — so I clicked through and saw this graph:

It immediately has an AI smell to it, but I gave it the benefit of the doubt for a second. Maybe their graphic designer was going for that sort of over-designed 2010s infographic style. Then I saw a “Made using AI” label below the image, but that could refer to the background photo, not necessarily the graph.

But let’s double check those numbers. Without doing any math, the blue section has around 400 votes and the green section has around 800 votes. But the blue and green sections are roughly the same size; the green should be about twice as big. The yellow section has around 800 votes and the red section has around 700, so they should be about the same size, too, except the red section is about half the size. And just going off vibes, the purple looks too big to be 1.5%.

How much critical thinking did it take to realize that it’s totally erroneous and shouldn’t be published, about fifteen seconds? (And in case you’re wondering, all the percentages add up to 98.3, not 100.)

Let’s make a real graph — look at how the results are completely different!

Plugging the results into Numbers (these figures are referenced in the text of the article as well, so hopefully they’re correct) and making a similar sort of 3D graph takes just a few minutes.

The image used in the graphic (mostly) matches an image from Slate’s media assets. While it took a few minutes for me to find and download it from their press site, Electrek must have done the same in order to give the AI a reference, so this is neutral. Bringing it into Pixelmator Pro and darkening it takes just a few minutes.

Adding the text and surrounding graphics takes the most amount of time, maybe 20 minutes. But it would definitely be faster if I had a template already set up, like the lead images I used in my how-to articles at Cult of Mac.

Is mine some masterpiece of graphic design? No. I barely checked to make sure objects are aligned. I would probably continue tweaking the background image for more legibility. I would definitely rearrange the poll options to a more logical order.

But is mine flagrant misinformation? No. This deserves a full retraction and an apology from Electrek.

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