The way it was discovered was what interested me more. They made a really stupid mistake that should have gotten caught at some point in the process. It's about as blatant an error as there could be for a clock background image.
I don’t know why Gizmodo is so fixated on the IIII, which as many people have pointed out is fairly common on clocks. Twitter/X is a nightmare to navigate in a browser, but the much better article on The Verge doesn’t even mention the Roman numeral. The AI origins of the background come from a lot of other evidence.
Alright, and? If the entire image were AI-generated, then I would see an issue here, but a real artist was still involved and the end result is by far transformative enough that it shouldn’t matter, and stock photos are used all the time in graphics work like this
At first glance it looks fine; maybe it even fits into the out-of-this-plane oddness associated with Loki and the Time Variance Authority.
But take a closer look—disconnected lines, strange digital artifacts, symbols that seem to be utterly formless, and... the Roman numeral “IIII.” Well, that’s not right, is it?
The user, Svarun, has a massive stock of photos that are also more or less AI soup, and while there is some plausible deniability here, any graphic designer worth their salt should have been able to figure out that the “Time Spiral” didn’t look right.
Additional reporting from the Verge notes that Shutterstock requires users to categorize any AI stock with special tags.
These suspicions come after Marvel’s highly criticized decision to use AI-generated opening credits for previous Disney+ series Secret Invasion.
In an interview with Polygon, Secret Invasion’s directer-showrunner Ali Selim admitted he didn’t “really understand” how AI generated images work.
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