Was AI used in those Fantastic Four: First Steps posters? Marvel says no, but that just leaves me wondering why they look so bad then

A couple of posters that arrived with the first trailer for Fantastic Four: First Steps have been accused of using AI, but Marvel is denying that that’s the case.

Annoyingly, it’s getting harder and harder to tell what is and isn’t AI as the technology gets better and better. So, rather than the olden days where if something looked funky and people would just dunk on it because they knew it was a bad Photoshop job, these days the first question that comes to mind whenever an odd looking image comes up is “is this AI?” That happened this week when a pair of posters for The Fantastic Four: First Steps came out alongside its first trailer, and if you look at them below, you can kind of understand why someone might think so.

For one, there’s a woman’s face that appears twice in the crowd, and the person waving the largest Fantastic Four flag appears to only have four fingers – hands not having the right amount of fingers is a common sign that something was generated with AI. Lighting also often looks peculiar in AI generated images, and both posters have an odd look to them. But, according to a spokesperson from Marvel that spoke with The Hollywood Reporter, neither poster used AI to make them. So, assuming that’s true, there’s another question: why do they look so crap?

It feels like a wider problem of Marvel doing things on the cheap, when we all know it has the money to do better than that. Weirdly, it also feels out of step with the first trailer, which actually looks like it uses real sets for the first time in a long while, rather than just everything being green screened. I do believe that they’re both just bad Photoshop jobs, the repeated face looking exactly the same isn’t something AI is likely to do, but all it makes me feel is that I’m not sure why I’d want to go see a new Marvel film if even the smallest of jobs are cheaped out on like this.

Presumably the actual film will come out fine, but we won’t know until it comes out later this year on July 25.