A promotional poster for the second season of Loki on Disney Plus has sparked controversy among professional designers following claims that it was at least partially created using generative ai. illustrator Katria Raden marked the image in X (formerly Twitter) last week, stating that the image of the spiral clock in the background “is giving all the telltale signs of ai, as if things were randomly turning into meaningless scribbles,” a reference to artifacts that Sometimes ai image generators stop.
The creative community is concerned that ai image generators are being trained in their work without consent and could be used to replace human artists. Disney has already received criticism for its use of generative ai in another Marvel series. secret invasioneven though the studio insisted that the use of ai tools did not reduce the roles of actual designers in the project.
Several X users (including Raden) noticed that the background of the Loki artwork appears to have been taken from a identical stock image on Shutterstock titled “Surreal Infinite Time Spiral Space Antiquity.” According to @thepokeflutist who purchased the stock image, it was posted on Shutterstock this year, ruling out the possibility that it is too old to be generated by ai, and contains no embedded metadata to confirm how the image was created. Several ai image checkers who scanned Stock’s image also marked it as ai-generated.
ai-generated stock images are a real problem for many creative professionals. As Raden notes: “Licensing photographs and illustrations on archival sites has been a way that many working artists have made a living. “I don’t think replacing them with images generated through technology based on mass exploitation and wage theft is more ethical than replacing Disney’s own employees.”
Companies like Adobe and Getty are also promoting ways to make ai-generated content commercially viable, but it’s unclear whether these platforms are any better than Shutterstock at moderating submissions that don’t comply with their contributors’ rules.
It’s also unclear whether Disney used generative ai elsewhere to create promotional material for Loki. Some X users have speculated that it may have been used in sections of the image such as the miniaturized characters surrounding Tom Hiddleston’s Loki, noting their awkward position. Disney has ignored our request to clarify whether ai was used in the Loki promotional art and to confirm whether the company had licensed the aforementioned Shutterstock image.
There’s an argument here that since the watch image used for Loki isn’t labeled as ai-generated by Shutterstock, Disney may not be aware of its origins. Still, the errors present in the stock image would be easy for most graphic designers to spot, so including random artifacts in the final poster is not a good look for Disney’s design or editing process.
The creative industry has been saturated with ai-powered tools like Adobe Firefly and Canva Magic Studio over the last year. These tools are intended to make things easier for people with limited design experience and are typically marketed to organizations that want to produce cheap art at scale. Companies often use stock images because they are fast, affordable, and accessible, reducing the need to hire experienced designers to create content from scratch. As ai-generated stock also grows in popularity, it’s easy to understand why creative professionals are worried about the future of their industry.
