They Khan\u2019t get away with that.<\/p>\n
Paramount+ looks to have used generative AI to whip up a thumbnail for Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, according to a report by Kotaku<\/a>. The image shows Captain Kirk, as played by William Shatner, dressed in a business suit. Kirk never dons a business suit in Wrath of Khan, or any other time throughout Shatner’s decades of portraying the character. He did rock a flannel shirt and jeans once during a visit to 1930s Earth.<\/p>\n Paramount+ wanted to use the image on the left as a poster for the wrath of Khan, so they used everyone’s least favorite technology to generate the rest of the image.<\/p>\n \u2014 Ryan Estrada (@ryanestrada.com)<\/a> 2026-05-28T23:57:45.992Z<\/a><\/p>\n I’ve watched every episode of Star Trek across a dozen shows and I’m not even sure business suits exist in that far-flung future, aside from an occasional appearance on the Holodeck<\/a>. There’s no money, so not much need for business.<\/p>\n That leaves us asking why Paramount+ and its little AI buddy decided to plop Starfleet’s most iconic captain in a button-up shirt and tie. We don’t know exactly what happened, but artist Ryan Estrada has an idea<\/a>. He noted that the actual image of Kirk is from Wrath of Khan, pulled from a scene in which the captain is getting a retinal scan to access a computer file. It’s not a particularly exciting scene, and he’s wearing a Starfleet uniform.<\/p>\n \n Estrada speculates that Paramount+ got attached to that image of Kirk getting a retinal scan and wanted to highlight it further by making it a thumbnail. However, the image from the film is a close-up of Shatner’s face, so generative AI was used to place Kirk’s head inside of a fake body and put that body in a business suit. His hair also looks very fake and weird as the original frame cuts off at his forehead. Long live AI slop Kirk.<\/p>\n Kotaku has confirmed that the thumbnail is still on the streaming platform, as have folks throughout the internet. Paramount owner David Ellison recently told<\/a> CNBC<\/a> that the company is “using technology to transform every single aspect of this business.” If that thumbnail is a harbinger of things to come, Trek fans should likely start stocking up on Blu-Rays.<\/p>\n As a lifelong Star Trek fan, it hurts to see the property controlled by modern Paramount<\/a>. The company has pretty much ended the franchise for the time being, after cancelling the surprisingly stellar Starfleet Academy<\/a> and stopping production on Strange New Worlds<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"They Khan\u2019t get away with that. Paramount+ looks to have used generative AI to whip up a thumbnail…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":673947,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[182,181,507,74],"class_list":["post-673946","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/673946","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=673946"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/673946\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/673947"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=673946"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=673946"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=673946"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}