Secret Invasion's Opening Sequence Is Made From AI-Generated Art
If, while watching the animated intro sequence for Marvel Studios' new series "Secret Invasion," you found yourself thinking that it looks a lot like those oddball AI-generated "artworks" that have been cropping up all over the internet this year, you're not wrong.
Director and executive producer Ali Selim told Polygon that VFX company Method Studios used artificial intelligence to create the intro sequence, explaining that he felt it was thematically appropriate: "When we reached out to the AI vendors, that was part of it — it just came right out of the shape-shifting, Skrull world identity, you know? Who did this? Who is this?"
"Who did this?" indeed. Method Studios has yet to comment on exactly what process was used for creating the intro sequence. However, the current generation of AI text-to-image models, like Midjourney and Stable Diffusion, use datasets of billions of images scraped from the internet. These datasets teach the AI what kinds of images are associated with particular words, in order for it to then produce images based on text prompts. Selim admitted that he doesn't really understand how the program used by Method Studios works:
"We would talk to them about ideas and themes and words, and then the computer would go off and do something. And then we could change it a little bit by using words, and it would change."
Whether you think the results are awesome or terrible, "Secret Invasion" having an AI-generated opening sequence is problematic — both legally and ethically.
Does Marvel own the copyright to Secret Invasion's intro?
As quickly as it has taken off, AI-generated art has become an intellectual property law nightmare. While the images in the datasets for these models might be freely available on the web, many of them are copyrighted. Getty Images is currently suing Stability AI, the creator of Stable Diffusion, on the basis that the company "unlawfully copied and processed millions of images protected by copyright and the associated metadata owned or represented by Getty Images absent a license."
Since this tech is still very young, there really isn't much in the way of legal precedent regarding its use. However, in March 2023 the U.S. Copyright Office released guidance on artificial intelligence which specifically states that AI-generated art produced via text prompts, in the way Ali Selim describes the "Secret Invasion" intro being created, is not eligible for copyright:
"If a work's traditional elements of authorship were produced by a machine, the work lacks human authorship and the Office will not register it. For example, when an AI technology receives solely a prompt from a human and produces complex written, visual, or musical works in response, the 'traditional elements of authorship' are determined and executed by the technology — not the human user.
The guidance goes on to explain that larger works which make use of AI-generated material can still be eligible for copyright if they contain "sufficient human authorship." Since the "Secret Invasion" intro also uses human elements like music and editing, it may well qualify — and full episodes of the show certainly would. However...
"In these cases, copyright will only protect the human-authored aspects of the work, which are 'independent of' and do 'not affect' the copyright status of the AI-generated material itself.
So, Marvel may be unable to copyright individual images like the one above, and they would therefore belong to the public domain.
The source of Skrull intelligence
The word "Skrull" is specific to the race of reptilian humanoids originally designed by Jack Kirby and first appearing in "Fantastic Four" #2, back in 1962. Prompts that ask AI image generators to depict a Skrull are therefore pulling from a more limited data pool than a more generic word like "dog" or "car." However, there's still a wealth of Skrull-related images available on the web, from Kirby's original drawings to artwork by Leinil Francis Yu for "Secret Invasion" (the Marvel Comics arc upon which the series is loosely based). A quick test run of prompts including the word "Skrull" in Bing Image Creator consistently produced results showing humanoids with green skin and pointy ears, with other features like purple hoods and red eyes sometimes mixed in.
If the art seen in the "Secret Invasion" trailer was indeed trained on comic book artwork of Skrulls, that opens up another can of worms in a topic that's already pretty wormy: how Marvel compensates (or doesn't compensate) comic book writers and artists for the use of their work in movies and TV shows. Feeding previously commissioned art into a machine in order to produce AI-generated art sets a concerning precedent. Using the same approach, Marvel Comics could ask an AI program trained on Marvel back issues to produce artwork in the style of Jack Kirby, and have a cheap simulacrum of the late Mr. Kirby to illustrate new stories about the Skrulls on demand.
While Marvel artists are employed under work-for-hire contracts, meaning that the publisher owns the copyright, it's doubtful that any of them envisioned their work being used in this way when they signed those contracts. And if nothing else, the fact that "Secret Invasion" premiered in the middle of a writers strike where AI is a key point of contention makes for some pretty terrible optics.