So, the first episode of Marvel Studios' 'Secret Invasion' is available today. Unfortunately, my enjoyment of it was soured quite quickly due to immediately noticing its intro sequence was made using AI.
I came across an article about it by Zosha Millman on Polygon.com. They reached out to Ali Selim, the Director and Executive Producer of Secret Invasion, who thinks that using AI plays with the themes of the show. The article then also states that they tried reaching out to Method Studios (who designed the intro) to ask about how it was designed, but they got no response.
Perhaps Method Studios will go into detail on the creation of this at a later date. However, their lack of response makes me worry. I think they should at least state what AI service they used, assuming it's a publicly available one. Many services have been criticized already for using artists' copyrighted work to train their AI without permission, which has led to companies like Adobe stating on their blog that their AI generation tool (Adobe Firefly) is trained on Adobe Stock and public domain images. Again, AI is helpful to creators as just another tool, but this is simply entering a few prompts, rendering, touching it up a bit (I can only assume they've used noise filters and sharpening to make it seem more cohesive), and then calling it a day.
Some people online think it's ugly, some think it's lazy, some think it's theft. I can't appreciate the aesthetics of this intro because there's no hard work behind it. I really hope this doesn't become a trend for big companies, though I'm sure in a few years we won't even be able to notice to complain.
(Screenshot from 'Secret Invasion' by Marvel Studios)
