\n This comes four months after the news that Disney laid of over 1,000 employees at Marvel Studios, many of whom worked in the concept art department\n <\/p>\n
Spider-Man: Brand New Day, the latest Marvel Cinematic Universe flick with an estimated budget of roughly $225 million, officially crossed the $2 billion worldwide earnings mark at the box office this week. Keep both of those figures in mind while you continue reading, as a new book featuring official Spider-Man: Brand New Day concept art just hit store shelves on Tuesday, and it quite blatantly features AI-generated artwork.<\/p>\n
As originally spotted by The Artbook Collector in a post on X<\/a>, one of the images in Spider-Man: Brand New Day \u2013 The Art of the Movie, a concept art book published by Marvel that was released on August 18, is a completely garbled mess.<\/p>\n A random, splotchy, half-formed taxi in the dead center of the page, a distorted mess of stairs, and a warped building that looks as if it\u2019s folding in on itself\u2014all classic telltale signs of lazy, AI-generated slop.<\/p>\n *Important please read. The image seen below has warped taxis and\u2026 pic.twitter.com\/IiPxi8tCPC<\/a><\/p>\n \u2014 The Artbook Collector (@theartbookguy) August 20, 2026<\/a><\/p>\n There are so many offensively terrible things to say about this that I\u2019m not even sure where to start, but I sure as hell wouldn\u2019t be happy about spending $50 on this \u201cart\u201d book only to find out that it features AI-generated images.<\/p>\n But the more immediate issue is that, back in mid-April, Disney fired over 1,000 staff members at Marvel Studios, and its visual effects department was hit the hardest by the layoffs<\/a>. Pretty easy to figure out why they chose to fire so many of the MCU\u2019s concept artists when they clearly planned to save a few bucks by AI-generating some slop instead.<\/p>\n But if Disney and Sony were willing to spend, at minimum, over $200 million to produce Spider-Man: Brand New Day, couldn\u2019t they have dug into the couch cushions for some extra cash and actually, I dunno, paid some real, human artists to produce the concept art instead? Especially considering they got all that sweet BMW money from pushing adverts into people\u2019s cars<\/a>. Just a pathetically embarrassing situation for everyone involved.<\/p>\n
In a mistake I won’t make again, I initially glanced over an image in Spider-Man: Brand New Day \u2013 The Art of the Movie, but after speaking with multiple artists, in my opinion it looks like it was made using AI.<\/p>\n