It appears that someone at Disney didn’t have enough with the crisis they had to manage after it was revealed that Secret Invasion had used AI to save money on artists and animators. The intro was an abomination that angered everyone.
Well, a promotional poster for the second season of Loki on Disney Plus has sparked controversy among professional designers after claims that it was created, at least in part, using generative AI.
Illustrator Katria Raden flagged the image on Twitter last week, stating that the spiral clock background ‘gives all the telltale signs of AI, like things randomly turning into nonsensical scribbles,’ a reference to artifacts sometimes left by AI image generators.
A complaint that we have already seen in 2023… and in another Marvel series
“The creative community is concerned that AI image generators are being trained on their work without consent and could be used to replace human artists.
Disney has faced criticism for the use of generative AI in another Marvel series, Secret Invasion, although the studio insisted that the use of AI tools did not diminish the roles of real designers in the project.
Several Twitter users pointed out that the background of the Loki illustration appears to have been lifted from an identical stock image on Shutterstock titled ‘Surreal Infinity Time Spiral Space Antique.'”
“Moreover, numerous AI image checkers that scanned the stock image also flagged it as AI-generated.
According to Shutterstock’s contributor guidelines, AI-generated content cannot be licensed on the platform unless it has been created using Shutterstock’s AI image generation tool.
There is an argument that, since the clock image used for Loki is not labeled as AI-generated by Shutterstock, Disney might not be aware of its origins.
Still, the errors present in the stock image would be easily noticeable to most graphic designers, so the inclusion of random artifacts in the final poster does not reflect well on Disney’s design or editing process.
Shutterstock did not respond to The Verge, which conducted the investigation, when asked whether the time spiral image violates their own rules about AI-generated content or to clarify what the company is doing to enforce those rules.”
