Man, I sure hate having to AI-vestigate everything I see online these days. I care very deeply that the art I consume is ethically made by humans and not stolen by a text-to-image model, but it shouldn’t be my job to look at every movie poster I see with a microscope to find the errors, and frankly, it’s a losing battle. It won’t be long before AI art is indistinguishable from man-made art, and unless our legislators are willing to act on behalf of humanity (I’m not holding my breath) AI art will eventually be an inescapable part of everyday life.
We’re nearly there already, but not quite. You can still tell the difference, and in a lot of cases, it isn’t even that hard. Take this new movie poster for Fantastic Four: First Steps, which Marvel shared along with the first trailer earlier this week. You don’t even have to squint to find the tell-tale signs of AI on this one. Just check out the four-fingered hand waving the big blue flag in the foreground, or the older woman wearing glasses standing under and behind the white poster. It’s like they weren’t even trying.
AI Art Is Inescapable
It’s not that I have particularly high standards for film marketing, but come on Marvel. The richest blockbuster generator in the world treats artists the worst, and it doesn’t seem like that’s a coincidence. After Secret Invasion’s entirely AI-generated opening credits (which it defended as an artistic choice at the time) I am a little bit surprised to see Marvel Studios so brazenly produce yet another AI disaster – but only a little.
Marvel has denied the use of AI, but several of the posters bear such obvious signs of AI use that it’s hard to believe that’s true.
This is the most heinous piece of AI-generated commercial art I’ve seen, but not because it’s a particularly sloppy example. What’s so distasteful about this poster is the fact that it’s so clearly emulating the style of comic book artist and writer Alex Ross. Ross, a legendary figure in the comic industry, has a distinct painterly style that often renders the larger than life characters of Marvel and DC through a nostalgic, Rockwellian lens. His aesthetic is unmistakable, and Marvel is leveraging it for Fantastic Four’s marketing campaign.
Ross is, crucially, a living, working artist, so co-opting his style with AI art is about the most offensive way I’ve ever seen this technology used. We often talk hypothetically about artists losing work to AI, but now we have an actual example, and it’s worse than we ever imagined. It’s not just making art Ross could have been paid to make, it’s making art that looks like the art Ross could have been paid to make.
Computer, Generate An Alex Ross Painting
I have no idea if Ross was approached to work on this campaign. He may have been offered the job and refused. For all I know, Ross gave Marvel his blessing to use AI to create some ads in his signature style. Given Marvel’s long history of ignoring and diminishing the role artists have played in creating their stories and characters, though, I’m willing to bet this is nothing more than a good old-fashioned rip-off, AI edition.
Ross is best known for his work at DC, particularly as the artist and co-writer of Kingdom Come, but in 2022 he released Fantastic Four: Full Circle, a classic 1960s-style FF story that became one of the highest-rated books of the year, and is clearly in part the inspiration for First Steps, also set in the 1960s. His involvement in First Steps would have undoubtedly elevated the film and been celebrated by fans, but instead, Marvel once again chose the easiest, cheapest, and most disrespectful option.