‘Spider-Man: Brand New Day’ Is Caught In a Tangled AI Web

While Spider-Man: Brand New Day stays in theaters, it’s now in the crossfire of allegations of generative AI use.

The film’s art book recently released, and fans online saw a page featuring New York concept art. Taxis and buildings colliding into each other prompted the allegations of AI use amidst a general confusion of why you’d need the tech to sketch out New York. Most users online deemed this a disappointing bit of news similar to the situation with Supergirl . But for others, this wasn’t as open and shut as it seemed.

Publisher of the 'SPIDER-MAN: BRAND NEW DAY' concept art book comes out, explaining in detail which process they used for this specific art, having used the cloning tool and photobashing, admitting it was just laziness but no AI usage.

The company also has an anti-AI policies. https://t.co/ROHMrjummj pic.twitter.com/NMW3KgyxCQ

A Reddit user by the name StingRe claimed to have done the layout and design for the Spider-Man: Brand New Day art book. They alleged, to the extent of their knowledge, there was “no AI art in [the book],” and that they received assets from the Brand New Day visual development team. While told that freelancers had used AI to populate backgrounds in their individual assets, StingRe noted (in now-deleted comments) that “any art flashed for AI use was either not provided to me for [the book’s] layout, or was removed.” To boost their statement, they stated Marvel Studios’ longtime visual development head Ryan Meinerding was “very strict” about checking every page for AI.

By StingRe’s admission, something could’ve slipped through the cracks. However, they countered a thought that others have had, which is that Adobe Photoshop’s fill-in tool is why the art looks as it does. They speculated the tool, which has been part of Photoshop for over 15 years, resulted in the “wonky taxi”: a watermark might’ve existed between two taxis, and when removed, the fill-in pulled in the closest pixels to close up that dead space. Ultimately, they concluded their explanation stating what happened was “on the artist,” and revealed Disney and Marvel weren’t looking to publish anything made with genAI.

“You don’t legally own anything made by AI, and contracts stipulate it must be ‘your wholly original work,'” they explained. “Anyone taking shortcuts in their art, here or otherwise, is making that decision personally. It isn’t a mandate from the company.”

At time of writing, Meinerding and Disney don’t appear to have spoken on the matter. io9 reached out to Meinerding, and will update when a response is given.

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