The AI alarms are sounding, but this one seems relatively benign.
The internet’s collective head is on a swivel these days for even the slightest whiff of AI intervention in art, and for good reason: Apparently not even big-budget productions from Marvel are immune to dodgy-looking art seeing official use, as evidenced by a new poster for the Thunderbolts featuring a character with six fingers on one hand.
Yep, look there on the bottom left: that’s a dude with six fingers, and as Gamespot points out, that character (Bob) has five fingers in a teaser for the film.
The Thunderbolts poster shared on social media. (Image credit: Marvel)
Assuming Marvel isn’t teasing a third act twist where this one particular Thunderbolt sprouts a new digit, the six-finger poster shared by the official Marvel Twitter and Instagram accounts today appears altered from its intended appearance. Interestingly, that version is the only version with the error. A more narrow version of the poster that cuts off before the sixth finger appeared in Marvel’s official blog post alongside the new teaser.
As weird as the rogue finger is, the most reasonable explanation is that someone on the marketing or social side needed to resize the standard poster to play nicely with Twitter or Instagram’s preferred image formats, so they opted to extend the edges out and “autofill” the empty space. Whether or not that means Marvel employed generative AI to do the job is unclear—an actual graphic artist would know better, but this could’ve been a simple goof up with Photoshop’s Content-Aware Fill feature, which is a machine-learning AI tool, but not exactly the same as generative AI like Midjourney.
The posters with bonus fingers remain online at the time of writing with no comment from Marvel as of yet. You can watch the teaser trailer for Thunderbolts* below (wow, that asterisk is actually part of the title).
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