THEME SONG FROM MARVEL’S SECRET INVASION SERIES PLAYS
Secret Invasion. Late Night With The Devil. Civil War. You’ve probably heard of at least one of these projects whether it be from an Instagram ad, a Marvel News Article, or maybe you’re just a David Dastmalchian devotée. But besides being an interesting triple feature lineup, all these projects have found themselves embroiled in controversy. Specifically with criticism directed towards their use of AI Art.
Now you might be thinking, Sophia ok, but how bad is it? AI was only used in small doses in these projects. In the case of Civil War, It was to make posters and for Late Night with The Devil and Secret Invasion to create graphics within these projects. Does it really matter? Why are people so up in arms about it?
Well Radio/Television/Film Major senior and production coordinator of student-run production company Studio 22 Shane Chung can explain.
SHANE CHUNG: People like to disguise talking about AI in film as like democratizing the medium for, so that more people can access it, which is perhaps maybe a salient point, but I feel like it disguises the fact that really at this point, who is it benefiting? It’s benefiting the big corporate studios who are trying to make pennies on the dollar and saving time and money by going for AI instead of, like, hiring a film worker
Now specifically, who are the film workers under attack here? Looking at the recent Writer’s Guild of America strike that began a little over a year ago, one of the main concerns was being replaced by AI. However, Joe Germuska, the executive director of the Knight Lab at Medill which does a lot of work with AI, says that this currently isn’t the biggest area of concern for AI in media.
JOE GERMUSKA: If you really have any concern about quality, then it’s not just going to be able to do the work of humans. I mean, there’s been lots of scandals already about, you know, Sports Illustrated and Gannett and other places sort of running a low-quality output because it wasn’t getting checked by humans who put too much faith in the systems.
Instead, the people we should be worried about the most are those on the lower rungs of the film ladder.
Their jobs are far from glamorous; washing slates, manually syncing audio, or transcribing interviews. But it’s a way to get your foot in the door which was the case for Grant Vance, who is now editor of the online publication No Film School as well as a freelance video editor. For him, this came in the form of working first as an Assistant Editor, or AE.
GRANT VANCE: That’s something that I had to do and gave me an entry level position. So it’s like, oh, well, that’s like, not a thing that really needs to happen anymore. So now that job is gone. But it’s like a job that kind of sucks and no one wants to do it anyway. So it’s sort of a double-edged sword.
A double-edged sword many productions within the last few years have had to wield. One of them is the aforementioned 2024 Indie Horror Film Late Night with The Devil.
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In the film, AI was used to generate “three still images which we edited further and ultimately appear as very brief interstitials in the film” according to a statement put out by the directors Cameron and Colin Cairnes after the film caught some flack for its AI usage.
Chung, despite being very against AI in film, found himself sharing some sympathies with the Cairnes brothers and their specific production circumstances.
CHUNG: It wasn’t so egregious. I mean, I feel like it was blown out of proportion a little bit. I’ll give them more lenience as they are more independent production. They should have known better, I feel like but it’s really not the end of the world
Because unlike Secret Invasion and Civil War which are backed by Marvel and A24 respectively, Late Night With The Devil worked with a budget only a small fraction of that. However, even then, some still don’t see budget constraints as a viable excuse, such as Vance.
VANCE: People are like, yeah, I just made this, and it looks better than what was in the movie and they could have paid me like 50 bucks for this
Specifically, to Vance it sends a bad message to bigger creatives everywhere.
VANCE: You could have paid someone to do this, and you didn’t. And so you’re kind of agreeing with the corporate idea that we don’t have to pay people. They’re just like,oh, we don’t have to put up money to like, pay filmmakers and pay crew. As a business person, that’s pretty attractive. As an artist, that’s pretty terrifying
Another concern is how AI Art is even created in the first place. Many of these models are trained on the work of other artists, many times without their knowledge. Which for Germuska creates some areas of concern.
GERMUSKA: I’m a technologist. I’m excited about innovation, but I think it’s very self-serving to claim that that’s fair use or that that’s like simple transformative work.
Chung puts it more plainly.
CHUNG: It’s a plagiarism machine basically
So with all these worries over AI taking jobs and stealing art, the question is raised: Is there a way for AI to be used helpfully and productively in the media?
And there are examples of this happening. Chung talked to me about the use of AI in Spider-man: Across The Spider-Verse in which a machine learning model was built and trained specifically on the work of the movie’s animators to create a way to draw ink lines to achieve the 2D look on a 3D model the Spider-verse films are known for. Without this program, the animation would have just been an overall more tedious process, so by utilizing AI they were able to speed up the creation of the film in a way that didn’t unknowingly take anything from the artists themselves.
Another example Germuska talked to me about was how the Knight Lab is looking into waysAI can be used to make the jobs of reporters, but specifically those in local and more understaffed newsrooms easier so they can still provide quality reporting despite barriers they may face.
So with the good and the bad in mind, where do we go from here? What does the future of AI look like? On that question my sources are divided. For Chung –
CHUNG: the bubble’s gonna pop eventually. I feel like, I feel it in my gut that there’s no way this thing’s gonna take over the world
Vance is a bit more unsure.
VANCE: Just this year alone, it’s blown up quite a bit exponentially. I think that things are definitely going to come to a head at some point in regards to things like, how it’s being abused and how it’s being used.
Meanwhile Germuska has a bit more experience when it comes to technological revolutions. As someone who was a student when the World Wide Web first was getting introduced, he finds a lot of similarities between now and then.
GERMUSKA: I was very optimistic. I had a lot of very, uh, now quaint and sort of embarrassing and utopian thoughts about It was going to happen from the internet and some of those things happened. And then a lot of really bad things that I maybe didn’t want to believe were going to happen also happened. And I think that will come again
But despite the good and the bad, Germuska has faith that in this AI reckoning it will all work out in the end.
GERMUSKA: I sort of ultimately maybe because it’s the only way I can sleep, like put my faith in people and figure that even if big companies make decisions that are bad for what I care about, people have found ways, people always find ways and I’d rather just sort of put my energy in finding those ways. You can’t always stop stuff, but you can route around it or you can sort of get ahead of it and say, well, if this is where things are going, here’s how we’ll adapt
And adapt we will because we don’t really have another choice.None of us know what will come next, not even AI.
For WNUR News, I’m Sophia Casa
THEME SONG FROM MARVEL’S SECRET INVASION SERIES PLAYS
