Marvel’s Secret Invasion It promises a bold departure from previous MCU series on Disney+. Marvel wanted to pull back the superhero elements that had derailed previous shows, to create a grounded spy thriller that seemingly takes place in the world and framework of the franchise—just like a show with shape-shifting aliens who, when transformed, shut up like garbage. First impression of viewers Secret InvasionHowever, isn’t this a tight thriller? Instead, the show distracts us from the show itself with its disturbing, somewhat grotesque, AI-generated title sequence.
Secret Invasion‘s ugly opening credits were made using AI footage; so much so that someone named Sagans Carle—clearly a nickname-gets credit on the show as an AI technician. Method Studios, the visual effects company that previously worked on the Disney+ MCU series Miss Marvel And Moon Knightdeveloped the series using productive artificial intelligence tools.
Thanks to artificial intelligence, Nick Fury transforms into a bloated, pulsating version of himself in this sequence before moving on to cubist nightmares that get bigger and smaller; everything turns a sickly green. The title credits rumble through the turbulent artistic soup that makes up the datasets of AI tools, depicting a series of replicas that evoke a particular aesthetic style but never quite capture it.
Director and producer Ali Selim Secret InvasionIn an interview with Polygon, he said of the process of working with the company, “We would talk to him. [Method Studios] about ideas and themes and words and then the computer would shut down and do something. And then we could use words to change it a little bit and that would change.”
This explanation of how sequence rendering works will be familiar to anyone exploring AI rendering. And the results, as you might expect, are emblematic of the uncanny, often disturbing images that AI scammers continue to proclaim as revolutionary.
Perhaps, as Selim suggests, the use of artificial intelligence in the series has a thematic resonance. In an AI landscape so saturated that it starts to repeat itself, the question of who you can trust becomes ironic when used in a project like this binary crossover spy thriller. Even AI models cannot tell what is their work and what is not.
But neither that, nor Selim’s admission that he “doesn’t really understand” how AI works is an excuse for the sequence. But his comments show the ignorance shared by members of both sides of the AI debate. This ignorance allows a company like Disney to use ethically ambiguous tools to create. Secret InvasionThe title sequence, however, also encourages people to incorrectly label AI regardless of its application. bad.
None of this is to say that what Disney is doing here isn’t bad. Whether the way AI iterates existing art is fair use is hotly debated – including multiple lawsuits – but everyone involved in this decision needed to know how audiences would react to the use of AI here. This series is a choice that only reinforces the negative talk around AI. there is definitely bad landed with many viewersincluding those worked on Secret Invasion work in other capacities or technology industries.
This is deserved up to a point. Iterative AI does not create art from a vacuum; It learns from datasets containing millions of images, including those of artists who never allowed their work to be used in this way. This is definitely something we should be worried about. So I can’t blame anyone as the media layoffs have reached a fever pitch and the WGA has been striking, at least in part, over job protections from AI, as it sees this as putting salt in the wound.
However, AI’s bad reputation stems from the fact that appropriate applications of AI are combined with the crude methods that rude people use it. HE this is the real shame. Midjourney is probably the most regularly invoked rendering tool used. Secret Invasiontitle sequence, AI, can be AI not mid-journey Something that many commentators overlook is that artificial intelligence is a concept that has been applied in many ways. And the vast majority of these paths are not only ethical but also exciting.
We are already seeing AI being used to improve conditions in the superhero media landscape. To the Spider Universe (and we can assume the same is true for new releases. Beyond the Spider-Verse) used machine learning, another application of the artificial intelligence concept, to create leaner processes for animators. Machine learning has not taken the place of anyone or taken away easily. Instead, it served as an auxiliary tool for mechanical animation tasks, based on a set of rules and images created by the same animators as animated faces.
In other areas, AI is making great strides in digital accessibility. Live captions, such as those provided by Zoom, are applications of artificial intelligence and are getting better and more accurate as a result. In the gaming industry alone, machine learning has been applied in the past month to create an affordable alternative to expensive head tracking hardware; meanwhile, indie developers are experimenting with productive AI to create vivid audio descriptions that wouldn’t normally happen in games. include.
These are just a few examples of the breadth of interesting, ethical, and downright cool applications in which AI is used. And the important thing to remember is that none of this is new. Sincere AI students understand that AI is at its best when it empowers us or makes things possible. To the Spider Universe. However, the idea that artificial intelligence can replace human input, is is new. This fear is driven by people who see it as a way to cut corners and save money, to the detriment of both employees and, in Disney’s case, viewers.
All this probably does what Disney does. Secret InvasionThe title sequence is worse. It would seem that we can claim ignorance of how artificial intelligence works, including the managers of the projects that use it. But there is so much information out there, and AI has been around for so long that we really should know better by now than to use it in unethical, unattractive, and sad ways.
The fact that companies like Disney are caught in the hype around iterative AI doesn’t mean we have to wipe it out entirely. yes we can know Secret InvasionThe title sequence and the precedent it sets for what it is: if we’re being honest, it’s gross, sarcastic, and well-suited to Disney. We can object and oppose what a morally ambiguous AI model does. But we must not forget the wonderful things AI does behind the veil of bad publicity that surrounds it, thanks to attitudes and actions like those at Disney.
The malicious enforcers of AI are trying to persuade us to love the bomb with the understanding that all this is a fashionable impermanence. The scam, like all scams (heard from NFT-bros lately?), is already falling apart under its own gravity. Still, he can do a tremendous amount of damage in his short time with us, especially if Disney continues to use artificial intelligence to undermine real artists, maintaining the precedent it has already set with the controversial. Secret Invasion credit.
Like all tools, AI can be abused, but take it from someone who has spent ten years as a designer and is now a journalist – whose livelihood is basically based on the “AI is coming for our jobs” bingo: AI has incredible potential.
Be optimistic, but perhaps color that optimism with caution for now, because despite all the great things AI can do, Disney chose to use it to make this gruesome opening. Secret Invasion.