3 Years Later, Marvel Is Correcting One Of Its Most Embarrassing Tech Fumbles
Just because a show is about AI, it doesn’t mean you need to use AI.
Artificial intelligence may seem like a recent discovery, but the concept and term have been around for longer than a century. In Marvel Comics, the android Vision premiered in 1968, and he later appeared in the MCU in Avengers: Age of Ultron and eventually shared his own spinoff with his wife Wanda Maximoff in 2021’s WandaVision.
Now, he’s getting his own spinoff-of-a-spinoff with VisionQuest, the upcoming Disney+ series exploring Vision’s relationship with his fellow androids, including Ultron himself, played by a returning James Spader. But while this series may be focused on the nature of artificial intelligence, it won’t actually use generative AI, unlike a previous Marvel show you may have forgotten about.
The world of VisionQuest was made without AI technology.
During a set visit, VisionQuest showrunner Terry Matalas confirmed to ScreenRant that no generative A.I. was used in the production of this series. “There hasn't really been a need. All the designs nod to how our current form of AI processes things... That felt like a fun way for us to comment on it.” In other words, the design behind the series was meant to evoke AI, but was completely human-made.
This may seem like the bare minimum for a TV production, but there is actually some interesting precedent for Marvel using A.I. in its TV series. Back in 2023, Disney+ released Secret Invasion, a very divisive series about the Skrull invasion of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Because the series was about the shapeshifting Skrulls, the series director Ali Selim confirmed that the stylized, painterly intro sequence was created using AI. “It just came right out of the shape-shifting, Skrull world identity,” Selim told Polygon. “Who did this? Who is this?”
Secret Invasion’s strange credits were created with AI tools to mixed results.
But this was 2023, before AI became the go-to technology for sports betting commercials and videos your older relatives share on Facebook. Simply put, the intro was strange, full of weird, inorganic shapes and fuzzy lines. Method Design, the company behind the intro, said in a statement that a “team of designers skillfully leveraged the power of both existing and custom AI technologies to apply the otherworldly and alien look.”
Now, the use of AI has gone from a cool, new, cutting-edge technology to a tacky, fake-looking cost-cutting measure that just looks like human designers were ignored completely. VisionQuest is cleverly subverting this by deliberately playing on the AI aesthetics we are all (unfortunately) used to now, but having them all created by actual humans.
Just as the AI characters are brought to life by real people in this series, so are the designs behind them, so you can enjoy this tale of AI knowing it’s all 100 percent human-made. The optics are certainly better, considering that Vision himself is perhaps the most heroic living AI on TV this year.
