“I reached out to my good friend Andy Park, who was the genius behind creating the original Wasp super-suit and concept drawings, and I said, ‘Is this true? Is this really what’s happening?'” Lilly said in a video post reacting to reports of Marvel layoffs amid a larger Disney pivot to AI. “He said, ‘Yeah, it’s true.’ I can’t quite believe that… that Disney has let go of the artists who brought the Marvel Universe to life through their genius and that the people who invented these characters and who designed them are being replaced by AI. AI that will take their designs and take what they created and use it to create iterations of that. I am so sorry, Andy. I am so sorry to every one of the artists who were let go.”
This is literally the history of Marvel Comics, though. Way before Disney or “AI”, they treated their creators like shit. Look up Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko.
This latest iteration of business as usual does show just what the purpose of “AI” is. Cutting costs, eliminating pesky labour, churning out progressively worse versions of past work at lower production outlay.
At some point “AI” is going to put enough people out of work, not just in the entertainment industry but really across the board, that nobody will be able to afford a trip to the cinema. Let’s see where the blame falls then.