The launch of the marketing machine for Marvel Entertainment's Fantastic Four reboot this month was overshadowed by claims that a Fantastic Four: First Steps poster looked like it was made using AI. Fans piled on to the company's posts on social media to criticise the design, which included a hand with three fingers – often a sign of AI image generation.
But it wasn't a clear cut case. Marvel denied that it used AI to create the poster for the upcoming movie, and many people have pointed out that it could have been an old-fashioned Photoshop fail with some rushed compositing.
The controversy shows one of the problems with AI becoming so prevalent – it's becoming hard to tell, and everything is suspect. Was it AI, or were the flags were added to the image as an afterthought, and pointing hands quickly be changed to fists? We asked for your thoughts.
Some readers found the three-fingered hand difficult to get over. "Admittedly, nothing else looks all that wrong besides the strange, AI-looking texture and font on the biggest poster (which could be explained by it being hand-drawn), but the hand is what's really bugging me," Evelyn Martosko wrote. "It doesn't look like a perspective/angle thing either where the other finger could be out of view."
Others were of the opinion that the mistakes in the image were more likely to be human error. "Humans make mistakes too," one reader said. "The detail of the people in the back is accurate. The more AI has to generate in an image the more it gets wrong. There's very little wrong with all the details in the background".
Some readers thought the conversation was too binary. "It's entirely possible that the whole initial image was made by a human, but the composition felt unbalanced so a hand was added with AI, " Adam Golan suggested, but added: "But there's a lot of decisions here I doubt an AI would make on its own, like covering people's faces with arms."
Finally, one reader asked if it really matters either way: "1900: photography is not art; 1910: Jazz is not music; 1950: rock 'n' roll is not music; 1971: synth music is not music; 1980: computer-aided graphics are not art; 2010: digital installations are not art, 2025: AI-assisted creativity is not art. See the pattern?"
Marvel has followed up on the poster above with some retro Fantastic Four artwork for individual characters that definitely doesn't look either like AI or a Photoshop fail. Fans are loving the minimalist retro designs.
