Hollywood’s writers are currently striking for a number of reasons, but one of the big ones is to ensure their work is safeguarded from the advances of “AI”. And right in the middle of it all, Disney has dropped its new Marvel TV series, Secret Invasion, which features an opening credits made by an “AI vendor”.
As this Polygon story reports, the credits were produced by Method, a visual studio that has been working, as a team of human beings and artists, on ads, TV shows and movies for years. In this instance, though, Secret Invasion’s opening is credited to “producers, designers, and an AI technician”, and the show’s director and executive producer Ali Selim—who “doesn’t ‘really understand’ how the artificial intelligence works”—tells Polygon he was “fascinated with the ways in which the AI could translate the sense of foreboding he wanted for the series”.
You can see the credits, which look like complete ass and are the polar opposite of foreboding, here:
That “AI technician” appears to have been Sagans, aka Carle Sagan, an artist “dreaming with machines” who had reportedly earlier posted about their work on Instagram and called it a “significant milestone as it pioneers the utilisation of AI technology in a production of such magnitude”. They have since, in the wake of fierce criticism of the opening from artists and fans, deleted it.
It doesn’t “[play] with the very themes of the show”, it’s a cheaper and faster way to produce worse results. As Naughty Dog’s David Blatt says in the tweet above, Disney and Method are “using exploitative and morally very questionable AI tools” here, while A24 artist Kenzie Bugg rightly points out that even if you do like the results, “the problem is this multibillion dollar company already infamous for underpaying their VFX workers [is now] finding ways to not pay them at all”.
Meanwhile artist Jeff Simpson, who has previously been at Ubisoft and Square Enix/Eidos, and who himself worked as an artist on Secret Invasion for months, tweeted “Secret Invasion intro is AI generated. I’m devastated, I believe AI to be unethical, dangerous and designed solely to eliminate artists careers.”
As we’ve covered previously, the rising popularity of “AI” imagery—it’s not AI, it’s machine learning—isn’t just some vague and distant threat to the work of creatives; some video games are already using the technology as well, with equally embarrassing results.