Marvel’s AI controversy proves audiences actually hate AI, yet it won’t go away

An upcoming Marvel production has been accused of using AI to create its poster. Some people have looked very hard at the new poster for the highly-anticipated The Fantastic Four: First Steps and believe they’ve spotted instances of people having too many fingers or duplicated faces. They were certain AI was the culprit, and they were vocally annoyed. Marvel came out and denied it used AI for the poster, but not all fans believe them.

This isn’t the first time this has happened. A poster for the upcoming Thunderbolts* movie was also accused of using AI — it looked a lot like actor Lewis Pullman had six fingers — and fans were furious when that happened, as well. Pullman himself spoke out about that one, telling Collider, “I actually spent some time because I was like, ‘Did they give me a sixth finger?’ But they didn’t. It’s just cropped at the right point where it looks like there’s an extra tip happening or something.” Yet the utter furor over the issue should tell you something.

You could argue, “Is it really a problem if Marvel uses AI to make some tweaks on its movie posters?” — but it is a problem. AI has crept into every aspect of our lives. It’s on our Google searches, on our laptops, on our phones. Some students are using AI to summarize their study notes instead of thinking for themselves and puzzling out what they don’t understand. People are, to be blunt, afraid that we’re sleepwalking into a world where computers are doing all of our thinking for us.

And then there’s the issue that using AI costs hardworking creatives their jobs. Here, Marvel has not exactly covered itself in glory. When the Samuel L. Jackson-starring Secret Invasion came out on Disney Plus in 2023, people soon discovered AI was used for the artwork in the opening credits. Director Ali Selim claimed the use of AI fit in with the themes of the show, but the fact remained that Marvel could have hired and paid a human being to create something just as good as the computer had come up with. The whole incident left a very bad taste in a lot of MCU fans’ mouths.

Frankly, hearing a film or TV show has used AI makes me much less likely to watch it. I just feel there’s something so anti-art about the whole process. Oscar contender The Brutalist famously came under fire recently for using AI to enhance the vocal performances of Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones. “Innovative Respeecher technology was used in Hungarian language dialogue editing only, specifically to refine certain vowels and letters for accuracy,” director Brady Corbet said. But I don’t want to hear a machine refine a person’s vowels. I want to hear those vowels come out of their mouth, no matter how imperfect they are!

Really, Nicolas Cage said it best about the ongoing threat of AI. “I am a big believer in not letting robots dream for us. Robots cannot reflect the human condition for us,” he said at the 52nd Saturn Awards. “That is a dead end. If an actor lets one AI robot manipulate his or her performance even a little bit, an inch will eventually become a mile and all integrity, purity and truth of art will be replaced by financial interests only. We can’t let that happen.”

We can’t, indeed. The backlash against films and marketing campaigns only suspected to have used AI should tell Hollywood something… but only the machines seem to be learning.