Posted in: Comics, Comics Publishers, Current News, Marvel Comics | Tagged: ai, Tom Brevooort

Tom Brevoort Calls AI "Fun To Use", "Efforts To Halt It…Are In Vain"

Marvel Comics' Senior VP Tom Brevoort says AI is "pretty fun to use" and that "all efforts to halt its further use are likely to be in vain"

Supervising Storyboard Director on The Simpsons, Matthew Schofield, posted to Marvel Comics' Senior VP and Executive Editor Tom Brevoort's newsletter comments saying, "I can almost see the Bleeding Cool headline now. "Marvel Comics' Senior VP and Executive Editor Brevoort says AI is 'pretty fun to use', and 'all efforts to halt its further use are likely to be in vain' ".. " and adding, 'I'm sure there will be absolutely no negative reaction from any of the actual human artists currently working for Marvel."

Well, you know, Matthew, since you asked so nicely. I had to shorten it, though, as I only had 71 characters to work with. I ran it on social media, though. So what exactly did Tom Brevoort actually say? Keep in mind that these are his opinions and not reflective of the company he works for.

"There's obviously been a lot of concern about the impact that A.I. programs are going to have on the creative arts, and how such programs remix and repurpose the works of other artists without credit or recompense. And these are all very sound arguments and matters that are going to need to be worked out. By that same token, the history of human innovation proves pretty conclusively that once something is discovered, all efforts to halt its further use are likely to be in vain. Technology changes the world, whether we want it to or not. So it falls to us to make sure those changes are proper and fair and equitable."

"All of which is to say that I wound up messing around with Google's Gemini AI program for a little bit this past week, and with it I generated a couple of things that I'm going to share with you here. Irresponsible? Probably. But for all that the software is undeniably dangerous, it's also pretty fun to use. And as this remains and will always remain a free feature, well, you get what you pay for."

"So I asked Gemini to generate a movie poster graphic for this feature, and this is what it came up with. I have no idea who Rex Fury or Max Midnight are, but both of them have excellent names. And the system wasn't smart enough not to list my first name twice, a relatively basic error. Still, this is kind of a cool image."

"I also asked it to generate a logo for this feature, and this is what it came up with. and I have to say, this is actually pretty good. I'm not going to use it for anything, I'm just sharing it for fun here. But that isn't bad. Such is the seductive allure of AI."

Of course, just because you don't sell them, it doesn't mean that this is not a copyright infringement from the previous artists whose work was scraped to create these images. And it is worth noting that Marvel Comics, as a policy, takes a very firm line against comic book creators who try to pass off A.I.-generated work as their own. Not for any moral reasons, you understand, but as the courts say that people don't own the work they generate with A.I., that means that if Marvel published it, Marvel wouldn't own it either, and that's the very worst thing for Marvel. Imagine, years down the line, after the launch of the Phase Twelve movie, The Manipulators, based on the 2027 comic of the same name, that it emerged it had all been created by Grok, and that Marvel didn't own the movie at all. And that Elon Musk might. So, no, they don't want to risk any of that… not until, at least, the US courts change their minds and assign ownership to A.I. created works to the prompter in question.

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