Disney+’s ‘Loki’ Called Out For Seemingly Using AI-Generated Artwork in Poster
Image via Marvel Studios
Wherever the God of Mischief goes, chaos seems to follow. This time, the Disney+ series centering around Loki has been swept up in a fiasco surrounding artificial intelligence-generated artwork.
The poster for Loki season two, which reached the streamer on October 5, captures abstract concepts of time not existing on a linear scale. A winding footpath encircles Tom Hiddleston’s Loki Laufeyson, while smaller characters—including versions of the former Prince of Asgard himself and his variant, Sylvie (Sophia Di Martino)—run up and down the spiral.
The background shows an old clock displaying Roman numerals, and it’s this part of the picture that’s raising eyebrows.
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In a true and literal sign of the times, viewers are suspecting that Disney+ and Marvel Studios have used AI-generated art for the backdrop.
Madly disappointed they're using AI generated imagery to promote Loki. https://t.co/SFhWpQfWE7
— Katria (@katriaraden) October 3, 2023
Taking to X, formerly Twitter, illustrator Katria Raden has pointed out the “meaningless squiggles” near the numbers on the clock that are “telltale signs” of an artwork being composed by text-to-image tools like Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, and DALL-E.
Here's the AI generated stock image found in the promo. I'm not sure this makes the situation much better, they should be vetting this.
— Katria (@katriaraden) October 3, 2023
And I turned off the replies bc I started getting silly comments I'm under no obligation to platform 😌https://t.co/yihAoNF5iz
Such distorted details, known as artifacts, are commonplace with AI art generators, which are fed with a melting pot of original artwork across the web—often without creators’ consent—to learn how to create their “own” images. A few models, such as Adobe’s Firefly, are trained on their own databases as well as openly-licensed content—but for the most part, the industry remains pretty much unregulated.
Sadly, it does appear AI was used to help create the ‘Loki’ poster. pic.twitter.com/uLPkBMQsxz
— The DisInsider (@TheDisInsider) October 3, 2023
And all the squiggly lines and crooked line work 😬
— The DisInsider (@TheDisInsider) October 3, 2023
To be clear, it does seem like the artwork in question wasn’t personally generated by Disney’s artists and graphic designers, but was instead licensed on Shutterstock.
Although the royalty-free image bank bans AI-generated content in general, it does allow artwork crafted from its AI Image Generator tool to be uploaded for licensing. Similar to how Adobe Firefly draws from Adobe Stock assets for its training dataset, Shutterstock taps its own resources for machine learning. For transparency purposes, works created from Shutterstock’s AI generator will come with a disclaimer.
This particular illustration, however, is not labeled as an AI-generated piece, which means it wasn’t cooked up on Shutterstock’s AI Image Generator and may come in conflict with the website’s policy.
The kickup brings to mind a similar controversy that Disney and Marvel Studios had landed in with Secret Invasion, where audiences learned that AI had been utilized to generate the entire opening sequence for the Disney+ series.
[via Mashable and We Got This Covered, images via various sources]
