Everyone on the internet has been very curious about even the slightest hint of AI interference in art lately, and for good reason: apparently even big-budget Marvel productions aren’t immune to questionable-looking artwork in official utilize, as evidenced by a modern poster promoting the Thunderbolts series, which features a character with six fingers on one hand.
Yes, look there, bottom left: that’s a guy with six fingers and all that. Gaming place points out that the character (Bob) has five fingers in the movie trailer.
Assuming Marvel isn’t teasing a third-act twist in which this particular Thunderbolt will release a modern figure, the six-finger poster shared by Marvel’s official website Twitter AND Instagram accounts today seem to have changed from the intended appearance. Interestingly, this version is the only one with the error. A narrower version of the poster that cuts off before the sixth finger appears in Official Marvel Blog Post along with a modern teaser.
As weird as the weird finger is, the most reasonable explanation is that someone in marketing or social media needed to resize the standard poster to fit Twitter or Instagram’s preferred image formats, so they decided to extend the edges and “auto-fill” the empty space. It’s unclear whether this means Marvel used generative AI to do the job — a real artist would know better, but it could have been a uncomplicated mishap with Photoshop’s content-aware fill feature, which is a machine-learning AI tool but isn’t exactly the same as generative AI like Midjourney.
The posters featuring the extra fingers remain online at the time of writing, with no comment from Marvel. You can watch the Thunderbolts trailer below* (wow, that asterisk is part of the title).
