Marvel movies have scored billions at the box office, but that didn't stop the company putting out posters for Fantastic Four which show clear signs of being cranked out with AI. The company denies it, but a variety of anatomical and structural oddities and tell-tale textures give the game away. Characters in the "crowd" poster have too few or too many digits. The bizarrely misshapen sets in the "television" poster exist in no reality where atoms touch.
A rep from Marvel Studios tells Deadline that AI wasn't used. There was speculation online that the comic book powerhouse used AI to make the poster given that two women had the same face and some people are shown with four fingers in the one-sheet.
AI is being widely used by professionals (in this case, I think, to generate individual elements of the composition which were then bashed together by a human into the final work) and the genie can't be put back in the bottle. A more pressing problem here is that it's just not competently done. Assuming Marvel isn't outright lying—and note that the denials are anonymously sourced—no-one there involved in these posters had the basic artistic or photographic knowledge to know their staff or contractors were using AI. Even now, no-one counts the fingers.
Also, duplicated faces isn't a marker of AI. It's a generic photomanipulation technique that pre-dates AI. If anything, it demonstrates that humans used AI here to make the bits but not the whole.
The posters have an evocative retrofuturistic style, and the use of telephoto optics is magical (cf. Simon Stålenhag), but AI "turds" are everywhere in these pictures. It's as if some intermediate editing/paintover stage, after the compositional bashing but before the coloring/mastering/finishing, was skipped. Digital painting is time-consuming and expensive.
I think my favorite tell in the poster set is the man's overcoat crawling like an eldritch being over the weird, uncanny rope.
