The first teaser trailer for Marvel’s Fantastic Four movie has just come out, and to my surprise, it looks pretty great. I loved the little touches of the old-timey 4:3 aspect ratio switching to 16:9 once the superhero elements came in and the use of what looks to be archival footage of the team before they got powers. Its retro-futuristic aesthetic looks different from the usual MCU fare, which I appreciate.
Marvel Denies The Use of AI In Its Fantastic Four Posters
But along with it came drama, specifically surrounding the promotional posters for the film. One of these posters, shared on Marvel’s Twitter account, got the majority of the backlash. In the background are repeated faces, signs seemingly floating in the air instead of being held up, a woman using a camera incorrectly, and a man waving a flag by grasping it between his knuckles. The biggest inconsistency, highlighted by many in the comments, is that one man seems to have a hand with only four fingers.
This poster has a similar issue with one of the children’s hands – one of them seems to only have three fingers, and the other has digits that look mangled and strange. It’s hard to nail down specific inconsistencies in the other posters, but something doesn’t feel quite right.
All we can really do here is speculate. A Marvel spokesperson told The Wrap that AI was not used in the creation of these posters. Do I believe this? Not really. Marvel has used generative AI before, in the opening credits of Secret Invasion, so it wouldn’t be unprecedented.
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Could it just be bad photoshop? An overworked graphic designer with limited resources and a tight deadline? Maybe. Artists make mistakes all the time, but what we’re looking at here is either that an artist did a bad job, generative AI was used to create the posters, or some combination of the two. Marvel is a huge corporation that should be able to afford to make good posters for its movies, so none of these potential conclusions are good.
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What’s most annoying about the whole thing is that this shouldn’t be happening at all. With generative AI and its ethical issues have come constant AI paranoia, but some of that is warranted. The tech is available to the masses, so anybody can choose to make a fake image and post it online. We have to scrutinise everything to determine if it’s real or not. Is this CCTV screenshot real? Is this piece of art I came across actually hand-drawn, or an AI-generated ripoff of another artist? Is this movie poster made by human beings paid for their time?
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One of the most parroted defenses of generative AI is that it democratises art, which fundamentally misunderstands what needs to be democratised, and discounts the fact that even if skill could be democratised, corporations are not the entities that need to be able to create art for free. Again, Marvel is a huge company that can definitely afford to pay an artist to make posters that don’t look super weird. It can even afford to pay several! We shouldn’t have to scrutinise its posters to figure out if they were made by humans or not.
But we do have to do that, because nobody wants to pay artists, even when they have the money, if they can get an AI model to do the same thing for free. Scrutinising the things that corporations produce is really the only way that audiences can hold them accountable, and even then, scrutiny isn’t a surefire way of spotting generative AI. I’ve seen countless artists on Twitter forced to post timelapses of their work to prove that they did, indeed, make it. The fact is that sometimes, people make mistakes when making stuff. Spotting AI is an art and not a science, especially as the tech gets more and more advanced.
Do I love that even after Marvel denied the use of AI, I have doubts? No. I think it’s a stupid, stupid world we live in where this is even a problem, where corporations are cutting the most minor of costs by cutting out artists, and we as an audience have to zoom into the backgrounds of posters and count the mistakes. But the alternative is letting these companies get away with the exploitation of artists’ work, and I’m relieved that we largely aren’t willing to let this slide. It’s a very slippery slope, after all.
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