The Avengers By Wes Anderson Imagined By The Russo Brothers Using AI Art
The Russo Bothers imagined what The Avengers would be like as a Wes Anderson project using AI art. On Twitter, they found some images from @digiguru and posted them to Instagram. In these pictures, the Marvel Studios universe gets the same sort of color-grading, throwback, diorama-like universe that characterizes most of Anderson's work. It's visually a bit of a shock, mostly because the kinds of worlds that the filmmaker designs are so different from the big bombast and "realism" of the MCU's big main features. However, the Russos are 100% down to watch some version of this if it was available. They're not alone, but it's probably pretty unlikely that Kevin Feige is going to announce Anderson as the director of Avengers: Secret Wars or something like that. For now, you can see the strange results of this down below!
While a lot of the world has been wrapped up in posting Lensa profile pictures of themselves and using different prompt-based image creating models to generate glorified jokes. There's been a lot of conversations around the ethics of pouring pop cultural output and artists' work into these kinds of databases and then using what they spit out. This year, Kotaku's Luke Plunkett spoke to video game artist Jon Juárez about AI art and ethics. Yes, @digiguru uses midjourney for their work. But, the questions surrounding this kind of pop-culture output remain.
"Many authors see this as a great advantage, because this harvesting process offers the possibility of manipulating falsely copyright-free solutions immediately, otherwise they would take days to arrive at the same place, or simply would never arrive", Juárez said. "If a large company sees an image or an idea that can be useful to them, they just have to enter it into the system and obtain mimetic results in seconds, they will not need to pay the artist for that image. These platforms are washing machines of intellectual property."
More recently, the directing duo had some criticism for Warner Bros. Discovery head David Zaslav's decision to not release Batgirl despite the movie being done already. They told The Hollywood Reporter that it was "corporate sociopathy." But, it might be deeper than that for the directors. "It's rare that I can think of something that high profile, that expensive, that was murdered in such a way," Joe Russo explained. "It's sad, but we're at a time in the business where corporate sociopathy is going to rear its head because people are scared."
What do you think of this trend? Let us know down in the comments!