One of Alex Garland’s most acclaimed films, Ex Machinawarned about artificial intelligence, a film ironically produced by A24, the studio now in the eye of the storm for having created a series of promotional posters with AI to promote its new film Civil War.
Yesterday, five posters depicting some cities in the United States devastated by war were published on social media (and posted in some locations). In them we see iconic places such as the Sphere in Las Vegas, the skyline of San Francisco, or even the Chicago River. The caption simply reads “America the beautiful. CivilWarMovie ”.
Anyone who has seen the film knows that these images are not present, but that is not the problem. At first glance, in fact, they seem like normal posters created by the studio’s marketing department, but by looking more carefully you can notice details that we are now used to recognizing in the images created by generative AI: the so-called hallucinations. An example above all: the two Marina Towers in Chicago, in reality, are side by side and are not crossed by the river. The swan-shaped pedal boat in Los Angeles doesn’t look like a pedal boat, but it doesn’t look like a real swan either. And again, in the image in Miami there is a car with… three doors.
The Instagram post was bombarded with negative comments from users lamenting the decision to turn to generative AI for low-quality work rather than paying artists, in what is A24’s most expensive production to date (50 million of budget dollars). Furthermore, the use of this technology is ironic not only because it is a film by Alex Garland, but also because it addresses the theme of war photojournalism. There are those who comment that “you know VERY well how the film enthusiast community feels about the use of content generated through artificial intelligence. […] How stupid can your marketing team be to think this is acceptable?”
The Hollywood Reporter reached out to the studio, which had the following to say:
These are AI images inspired by the film. The whole movie is one big “What if…?” and we wanted to continue this theme on social media – powerful images of iconic locations with dystopian realism.
There are three problems with this statement: the first is that the “iconic locations” are not real (see the hallucination of the Chicago towers). The second is that the work was so sloppy that they did not ensure that an artist reviewed the final products and corrected the aforementioned problems. The third is that the practice requires that it be signaled in some way that an image is generated by AI, and this has not happened.
We remind you that Civil War is also available in Italian cinemas from today.
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Tags: Civil War A24 publishes AIgenerated posters uproar social media Cinema
