The newest A24 movie Civil War is about a civil war taking over the United States, told from the perspective of a team of journalists. The independent entertainment company recently released a string of posters promoting the Alex Garland movie, but it looks like AI played a hand in their designs. This use of AI imagery promotion has not gone over the heads of the internet calling them “foul and unacceptable.”
AI use may be fun if you want to see what The Rock looks like as a Disney princess or what the doomed characters of Harry Potter look like with happy endings. As the technology of artificial intelligence has vastly improved over the years, it looks like film studios are using AI in their marketing. After A24 released new posters of its latest dystopian film Civil War, the internet couldn’t help noticing AI involved in the making of the promotional images with one user calling them “foul and unacceptable.”
Why on earth is @A24 using AI generated images for promo instead of working with and paying a real human artist? This is genuinely foul and unacceptable.
In some of Civil War’s promotional images, we see various U.S. cities devastated by war. The photos featured in the X post showed an armed patrol boat in a Los Angeles pond, the Las Vegas Sphere as a burnt wreck, troops on patrol surrounding San Francisco’s Palace of Fine Arts, and a Miami street surrounded with debris. In the next set of Civil War’s photos, one tweet pointed out the mistakes the AI-created photos displayed.
Chicagoans will see this and want to avoid the film. We know what our city looks like, what message is A24 sending by publishing A.I. imitations that would get a true artist fired had they made these mistakes? The Marina City towers should be next to each other.
What both of these X users similarly mentioned was that AI was used in replacement of a traditional artist creating these images. The WGA Strikes brought awareness to the fear of future AI use if screenwriters get replaced or if studios digitally replicate an actor’s likeness. If big-name studios like A24 are implementing AI-generated photos to promote their movies, an X user pointed out this could be our new reality.
oh cool we’re at a stage where we’re getting AI movie posters. for an A24 movie. cool.
This wouldn’t be the first time that movies have used AI. Some people boycotted the horror flick Late Night with the Devil when one social media noticed an AI-created image was used in the film. Users commented their disappointment in this discovery and even threatened to skip out on the movie completely. The film’s directors Cameron and Colin Cairnes admitted the use of AI for three of the film’s still images to fit in with the film’s ‘70s setting. Another X post pointed out the artificial intelligence imagery for the Miami-set poster that had an apparent error in it.
A24 dropped these posters all accentuated with or generated by AI techniques. The fans hate it, but in a year, you won’t be able to tell. Too late.
Designers often use content-aware. I do. The issue is they could’ve paid a human to tie this all together and fix obvious errors.
Based on what’s shown in the wartorn Miami poster, the car in the photo has three doors. It proves that while AI image programs may be able to quickly generate an image based on a prompt, it doesn’t look like it’s always accurate.
A24 using AI to create Civil War’s posters had the internet give strong reactions to the images mucking up the Chicago skyline and not hiring a human artist to create the images. As users pointed out a number of inaccuracies found in the photos, it makes me wonder how much of a role artificial intelligence will continue to have in future film marketing. You can watch the 2024 movie release of Civil War playing in theaters now.