Intro for February 7, 2025

Dear Gossips,

Earlier this week, Marvel debuted the teaser for its much anticipated film, The Fantastic Four: First Steps. In its first twenty-four hours, the teaser racked up 202 million views, the best trailer debut for a non-sequel Marvel film ever. 

That’s great news for Marvel, but three days later, that is not what anyone is talking about. What we’re talking about instead is the film’s poster, which appears to be made, at least in part, with AI.

It’s a cute poster, right? Harkening back to the space race and the global attention astronauts once received, it’s nice. And I admit, I didn’t scrutinize this poster because work is hell and it’s a miracle if I look at anything other than spreadsheets and code right now. But I did see the headlines stating that Marvel denies the use of AI in the poster, and then I DID take a second look, and boy, it didn’t even have to be close. The goofs are obvious.

The first one I noticed is the four-fingered hand. F-cked up hands are a dead giveaway for AI, maybe because so many people can’t draw hands that AI stole from wonky drawings (garbage in, garbage out). But the lady’s face repeating in the crowd also sticks out—it would be less obvious if they weren’t so close together—and then there’s the lady trying to look through a Rolleiflex camera, not peer down into it. Rolleiflex cameras are “top view”, so you frame and focus while staring down into the camera, not through out to your subject. Some people have also criticized the guy with the more common single-lens reflex camera in the bottom-right of the poster, but that looks better to me, except he’s not focusing his lens. 

The cameras actually don’t look like AI to me. They look like they’re drawn by someone who just doesn’t know much about photography. Like how you would stabilize an SLR with one hand on the lens, so you can focus, or that you look down into a Rolleiflex camera. Even the four-fingered hand looks better than most AI slop, which usually gnarls fingers into unnatural shapes. Excepting the missing finger, that hand looks alright.

So I don’t think this is pure AI slop. This looks more like a bad Photoshop job, like an actual human drew something and a computer made it worse (computers making it worse, the story of my life right now). Even the repeating face can be an error out of image touch-up tools. I’m not saying for sure this poster is photoshopped, but it kind of looks to me like maybe Marvel had a person do the bare minimum and then used Photoshop or similar to “touch it up” and ended up with some sloppy AI elements.

That doesn’t make it okay! They’re a comic book movie studio, they have access to some of the best illustrators in the world! Pay a person to properly draw your poster and leave their work the f-ck alone! But this IS the kind of corner-cutting that has become synonymous with AI. Even if a real human being worked on this poster at some point, it’s pretty clear AI interfered with it (four fingered hand, Marvel’s failure to name the artist who drew the poster). And like everything generative AI interferes with, it looks worse for the non-effort. And it makes me wonder where else Marvel is cutting corners. 

This is a huge problem for AI as an industry and anyone who wants to use it in creative industry—leaving aside all the copyright and labor issues, people have come to associate AI with crap. And this might be the message that gets through to corporations more than any other—use AI and risk consumers just assuming your product is sh-t. 

Live long and gossip,

Sarah