Image Credits:<\/strong> Marvel Studios<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Of course the timing is poor with the strike and other questions of artistic exploitation. No one disputes that, ethically produced or not, the titles feel out of touch right now \u2014 but arguably that\u2019s because the very themes they are meant to express have become mainstream!<\/p>\n

Had they just done stills of Nick Fury with a backdrop that only shows itself as AI when you look closely, that would be very different. An attempt to replace an artist\u2019s contribution, at this stage of the debate, is by necessity something of a surreptitious approximation \u2014 like Indiana Jones replacing the golden idol with a bag of sand. He didn\u2019t succeed, and AI art has similar trouble (though as yet no boulder).<\/p>\n

Notably, if you watch the show to the end, you\u2019ll find that there are credits there, and an enormous number of the people who worked on the show are artists \u2014 hundreds of them, at a dozen VFX houses and units. Marvel is not circumventing artists \u2014 if I had to guess, I\u2019d say it\u2019s probably the single biggest employer or customer of professional artists in the world. (Certainly so if you include Disney.)<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve also heard that they often pay bottom dollar and work those artists like borrowed mules, of course, but that\u2019s another matter (and one worth taking them to task for). This treatment for the titles didn\u2019t read the room correctly, and there\u2019s still the question of whether the AI tools used did, in fact, co-opt other artists\u2019 creations in order to produce the result we saw \u2014 however carefully \u201cguided\u201d and composited it was. So no free pass for Marvel.<\/p>\n

But the knee-jerk reaction by many also feels out of touch in its own way. Artists who create for a living are, from my experience speaking with them, less concerned about AI tools themselves (in fact many already use them in their processes) than with the people who make them and who make decisions about them. (Admittedly, some I\u2019ve spoken to are a hard no.)<\/p>\n

An generative model couldn\u2019t and didn\u2019t produce this opening sequence \u2014 it was storyboarded, sketched, generated, tweaked, animated, and all the rest by professionals. Yet the fears that erupted when people saw it reflect a very real concern that penny-pinching producers and managers will choose to use AI even though it doesn\u2019t do what they think \u2014 and certainly in spite of the ethical considerations. As others have pointed out, the tech can be scary, but the people using it are much, much scarier. In this case it was a bit of a miss but not the insult to artists that some have judged it.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

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