The internet is collectively going crazy at the slightest sign of AI interference in art these days, and for good reason: Apparently not even Marvel’s big-budget productions are immune to dubious-looking art being officially used, as evidenced by a new Thunderbolts poster featuring a character with six fingers on one hand.
Yes, look there on the bottom left: That’s a guy with six fingers, and as Gamespot notes, that character (Bob) has five fingers in a teaser for the movie.
Assuming Marvel doesn’t announce a third-act twist where that one Thunderbolt grows a new finger, the six-finger poster shared today by the official Marvel Twitter and Instagram accounts appears to look different than intended. Interestingly, this version is the only one with the error. A narrower version of the poster, cut off before the sixth finger, appeared alongside the new teaser in Marvel’s official blog post.
As odd as the rogue finger is, the most plausible explanation is that someone in marketing or social needed to resize the standard poster to work well with Twitter or Instagram’s preferred image formats, so they decided to expand the margins and “autofill” the empty space. Whether Marvel used generative AI to do this is unclear—a real graphic artist would know better, but it could also have been a simple bug with Photoshop’s “Content-Aware Fill” feature, which is a machine learning AI tool, but not quite the same as generative AI like Midjourney.
The posters with bonus fingers are still online at the time of writing and there’s no comment from Marvel yet. You can check out the teaser trailer for Thunderbolts* below (wow, that asterisk is actually part of the title).
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