Marvel’s Secret Invasion Opening Draws Backlash For AI Art Use

Marvel’s Secret Invasion has debuted its first episode, but for some the show was stolen by the invasion of AI art for its opening sequence.

The new series’ opening credits sport the all-too familiar distorted and shifting of AI generation- that is to say, the sequence was generated by a program likely trained on various artists work without their consent.

The Secret Invasion credits even confirm the AI art use, leaving little room for doubt.

While the majority of Marvel fans are just happy to have more content to consume, some in the community have voiced their disappointment that one of the richest entertainment companies couldn’t pay real artists to do their title sequence.

“Deeply dissapointed (sic) that Secret Invasion’s intro is animated AI art”, writes freelance artist Frederikhornung on Twitter. “The tech bros are going to see this as a big win, when it’s only another symptom of the now-creatively hostile MCU production monster. Who cares if “it fits the theme cause it’s uncanny”. Disgusting”.

Executive producer Ali Selim has defended the decision to go with AI art, saying it was an artistic decision- while also letting slip that the decision was always going to be to use AI art, despite not knowing how it works.

“When we reached out to the AI vendors, that was part of it — it just came right out of the shape-shifting, Skrull world identity, you know? Who did this? Who is this?”, Selim tells Polygon in an interview.

While it’s easy to take potshots at how weird and uncanny they’ve somehow made Samuel L Jackson, one of the most recognizable faces of modern cinema, a lot of the concern is down to ethics- there are more artists than ever in the industry, some specializing in the surreal horror the executive producer claims to want

“Hearing the Secret Invasion opening is AI art, like if you wanted a weird surreal/shapeshifty look you could have hired a horror artist, especially one of the ones that specializes in photo editing. There are so many talented ppl that could probably give you the same result” says another user, AnnaIsAlive.

AI art’s popularity among executives stems from two sources- one, a desire to cut costs and two, a recurrent poor understanding that an algorithm trained on stolen work is somehow alive.

Meanwhile, the pushback from the issue comes from a calling out of those exact points– artists are literally the reason companies like Marvel are the multimedia giants they are today, and they believe that the push for AI is more about having content created by an entity that can’t strike than it is about “Futuristic innovation”.

The ability to not have their work used to train AI is one of many issues raised in the Writers Guild of America’s current ongoing strike, which has been going on for well over a month now.

Join Us!