We found out on Wednesday that the opening credits for the new Marvel show
Secret Invasion make use of AI generated images. Naturally, this divided opinion,
and yes, that is a significant understatement. Let s talk about it.
First this video is spoiler-free, I ll be talking about the first episode of Secret
Invasion in very vague terms, so, yeah you can watch this without worrying about that.
Second: I am not a fan of so-called AI art, or generative AI more widely that is, your ChatGPTs,
your Midjourneys, the stuff that turns text input into media output, the type of thing Joe
Russo is so enthusiastically misinformed about. Admittedly, I m not an expert, but I know enough
about the technology, how it s being used, how it s likely to be abused, to be very sceptical
of the ramifications this type of AI could have in entertainment, in employment, in politics,
and just in general, to the point that if I had a magic lever that d indefinitely pause
all further research into generative AI around the globe - yeah, I d probably pull it. Maybe
that makes me a Luddite, but the Luddites were based as fuck, so I m fine with that.
All that being said, here s my hot take: I think the Secret Invasion credits are
fine cool, even. Mostly. And if you feel like sticking around for the next 11 ish minutes,
I ll tell you why. Starting with the headline: Secret Invasion is all about AI. Well, that is
overselling things slightly, but this is a show about the power of misinformation, about a world
that s failed to keep up, about false images being generated and wreaking havoc. Secret Invasion,
the Disney+ series, could only have existed in a post-Fake News world. Describing the show,
Polygon writes, One second, you re looking at Nick Fury or an esteemed world leader;
the next, you see their face morph into something (or someone) else entirely. How easily could the
world be destabilised if you could watch people doing things they didn t do, hear them saying
words that never crossed their lips? How fast can things change, can the threats develop, iterate,
leap forward unrestrained, now that they re out there, now the genie s out of the bottle? The show
s about the risk of believing the wrong thing, but it isn t just about the risk of believing the
wrong thing, it s about the fact that everything is different now this is a possibility.
The parallels to the issues posed by AI are numerous and immediately apparent. With few
exceptions, the type of threats made possible by the existence of Skrulls also become dangers in
a world with sufficiently advanced generative AI. Regardless of how far back production stretched,
to release a show with this story in 2023 is to release a show implicitly responding to recent
leaps forward in artificial intelligence. This is all subtext in the show proper, but I ll say it, I
think alerting the viewer to this, prompting these questions from minute one (or thereabouts) in this
way is cool and kinda smart. But the success isn t purely thematic, it s also tonal. That same
Polygon article reveals that Director-producer Ali Selim was fascinated with the ways in which the AI
could translate the sense of foreboding he wanted for the series . Selim says, the idea to have
Method Studios use AI on the sequence came right out of the shape-shifting, Skrull world identity,
you know? Who did this? Who is this? I think it s fair to say that attempt to unsettle succeeded
better than they could have hoped for. And let s be clear, this glitchy style wasn t just a way to
skip out on paying artists, it was the point. If Marvel simply wanted to generate realistic looking
backdrops for their credits with these AI tools, they could have done, they would have done. What
we re seeing in this opening sequence isn t Method Studios pushing generative AI to its limits,
attempting to make the most human-passing imagery they could, this isn t the best these tools are
capable of, this is a clear attempt to recreate the popular perception of what AI art looks like,
to supplement this shifting, impressionistic sequence with an evocation of viewer AI anxiety.
The fact that this isn t simply drawing on generative AI, but on the perception of generative
AI, is what takes it from hacky to inspired. This also indicates that this wholecloth use of
generative AI is not likely to become the norm for Marvel it s so obvious, so in-your-face,
so clearly purposeful here that this type of usage could only really be a one-off. This is,
emphatically, not a case of Marvel trying to normalise something on the downlow,
slip generative AI under the viewer s radar. And zooming out from the discourse, back into
the show, on a purely aesthetic level, the choice to employ that familiar, firmly uncanny AI style
achieves the desired effect, and then some. That all paints a pretty rosy picture,
which is probably wrong. This is definitely not all positive. The way I ve described the
role these credits play kind of made out that Secret Invasion was in a neutral position,
using AI generations to comment disinterestedly on this phenomenon at a remove, and this is obviously
not the case - by using AI generation to build an intro sequence for such a high profile show,
Secret Invasion has itself become a step forward in the development and proliferation of the very
thing it seems concerned about. Again, there is a distinction to be made here. Non-generative AI,
traditional machine learning? That s been used by Marvel for ages. They used it to make Thanos!
According to the VFX teams behind the mad titan, visualising Thanos would have been practically
impossible without AI. That technology didn t replace workers, it augmented their abilities
sustaining, creating, jobs instead. Generative AI is the worrisome thing here, that s the thing
with the potential to replace artists, and the potential to kick misinformation campaigns into
hyperspeed. Generative AI is where the ethics get dicey and there is something darkly ironic in
the parallel between AI-exploited artists and the Skrulls human shells. Midjourney, Stable Diffusion
and so on aspire to replace the very same artists whose work, often nonconsensually, was used to
train them. Secret Invasion sees Gravik s Skrulls appropriate the bodies and features of those they
sim for their own purposes, purposes which also tend to run counter to what those simmed subjects
would have wanted. So, yeah despite the aesthetic success, it seems like there s a hypocrisy there,
one that hasn t yet been and let s be honest, probably won t be reconciled by the show.
Is all this worth it for a credit sequence, however well it fits,
whatever questions it provokes? Maybe not. As James Whitbrook wrote in an article for Gizmodo,
this is a scary line to cross and I think it is a shame Marvel were the ones to do it,
regardless of any potentially mitigating context what s troubling here is the knowledge that such
a high-profile use could well inspire copycats, who don t see or don t care that here it was
done for a reason, who might simply churn out less stylised, more realistic, less noticeable
AI imagery to fill out credit sequences in their own projects. So again - this is definitely not
all positive but let s not leave it there. At present, it s hard to gauge how much of an
impact one credit sequence will have on the wider industry but I do think there s only so far we can
hold eventual lazy copycat actions against Secret Invasion, and on balance, if you approach this
one-off use itself and not the potential, wider impact on the industry, if you re thinking just
about the use of generative AI tools to create this specific sequence, for this specific series,
to evoke these specific things I think this is ok. I think this the most ok it s ever going
to be. Really, I think this is the best use case for generative AI tools I ll come back
to what I mean there in a couple of minutes and in this case, generative AI is a tool.
That feels worth pointing out. The whole sequence is not AI the text isn t, the music isn t,
the selection and sequencing of these images, this whole thing was very obviously put together
by humans. Again, via Polygon, the staff for the credits includes producers, designers, and an AI
technician The Gizmodo article makes the point that we ve not really been given any specifics
as to how many staff worked on the sequence, and that the number seems to pale in comparison to
the amount of VFX artists working on the rest of the show but this is a credits sequence. Sometimes
those are amazing, collaborative affairs, requiring hosts of talent to put together, but
often they re not, at least compared to the body of the show and again, no expert, but it seems
unlikely that significantly fewer people were employed to put together these credits than, say,
Loki s, or the Falcon and the Winter Soldier s. AI taking jobs away from artists on a wider scale is
obviously bad. The tech s probably a few years away from this becoming a major problem again,
Secret Invasion is one of the only shows where the glitchy imperfections associated with AI
generation in its current state work stylistically but yeah bad. From the information we ve been
given, though, it doesn t seem that this is a case of replacement insert Skrull joke here. It doesn
t seem like the choice was shall we hand-animate a glitchy, shifting landscape of almost realistic
images, or shall we just get an AI to do that it seems like the concept of drawing on that AI
aesthetic came before any visual outline, and that s pretty neat - Patreon supporters will remember
the discussion we had in April s exclusive on the way credit sequences have become increasingly
inventive spaces, interacting with the body of the work in ever more complex ways, and we see
Secret Invasion taking a step toward embracing the potential of the paratext in this decision.
If you make an effort to separate out the labour argument here from the artistic one,
the ethics from aesthetics, if you hold both as valid, to some degree linked,
but to some degree independent the case of Secret Invasion s credits becomes a fascinating one.
As suggested above, the general reaction to all this has been explicitly negative,
and I understand that, I sympathise with it, but - I think it s a broad reaction to a specific case,
the particulars of which complicate things in a way not everyone is necessarily considering.
Now if it comes out that more traditional credits were planned but got axed to keep costs down or,
something like that, obviously that d change things but for the time being I see this as an
effective, novel, and - taken in isolation maybe ethically dicey, but relatively harmless move.
People love to conflate how good a piece of art is with how good that piece of art is.
When the Justin Roiland stuff broke, half the internet reflexively disavowed Rick and Morty,
flipping right away to the position that it s shit, actually, it always had been,
and they d always thought so, because it s easier to do this than to exist in
a world where bad people can make good art, or where, in our case, richly creative choices can
emerge from moral quandaries. They made a really effective decision here,
but should they have? is a way more exciting discussion to me than this
looks like shite, not watching it, Marvel bad . Or, another perspective: at the end of the day,
Generative AI tools like this exist. We don t have a magic lever, we can t un-exist it,
it is going to be used, in one way or another so doesn t it make more sense to appreciate limited,
appropriate, effective uses like this? Generative AI is a tool, at present a fairly limited one,
the existence of which raises a lot of questions, portends ominously further
change but a tool that nevertheless exists, and does offer possibilities for interesting
use. I guess the bottom line of this video is I think this is one of those interesting uses.
Look, maybe this is a bad take the unthinkably rare Pillar of Garbage L I was in two minds
about making it, so if you do think I m chatting wham please do let me know why down below. I m
open to having my mind changed. But otherwise, that s probably it. Oh, and the actual episode
after the credits was pretty good too some of the dialogue was a little expository but the
chemistry and tone? Mwah, Chef s kiss. Thanks for watching, though, and huge thank you and
shoutout to Eric Ravenscraft who provided some immensely helpful feedback on this video s script,
and contributed more than a few fantastic ideas. That parallel between the Skrull shells and the
AI-exploited artists, for instance? That was his. Go give him a sub or a follow is my point. Big up
also my Patrons who you re seeing now, especially Daniel Goldhorn, Heather Long, Ryan Emerle and
WeirdyBeardy. Come back next time for a video essay about masculinity in Treasure Planet.