So Disney has gutted Marvel Studios’ visual development team:

Disney announced big layoffs earlier this week, reporting that roughly 1,000 employees across the company had just had their jobs eliminated. While the cuts were company-wide, reports from Forbes suggested that one of the biggest branches hit was Marvel Studios, which lost staffers across the board—but which suffered especially harsh cuts to its famed visual development team.

Source: https://www.pastemagazine.com/movies/marvel/disney-lays-off-marvel-visual-development-team

Looking back, the writing may already have been on the wall. For the last two decades, superhero movies have drowned the world in a CGI deluge. One could argue that this was the slop before the AI slop. Digital artists and designers were also among those most anxious about the rise of so-called “AI art.” Some artists tried to preserve a visibly human element in their work, even within heavily digital workflows.

That said, some people abandoned those qualities long ago and fully embraced the machine back when the machine was still comparatively dumb. I am not judging them; they probably felt they had to, the same way people always say you have to embrace what is “inevitable.” Now that the machine can simulate just enough intelligence to scrape, steal, and spit out AI concoctions, many of the very people who adapted most completely to the industry’s digital demands now find themselves treated as expendable. There is a bitter irony in that.

I feel sorry for people who were encouraged for years to trust this system, only to discover how disposable it always considered them. There is a bit of them in all of us who are not living under a rock, and in almost every area of life. If you are Gen X and remember the early digital era – the age of 8-bit machines, early home computing, and later the internet – you probably remember the feeling that everything computer-related was important and inevitable. Every new gadget, operating system, and device seemed to carry a sense of glamour and urgency. Millennials and Gen Z came of age later, when the digital world was already largely built out, so in a sense they were born into it. As for Boomers, many of them seem to get caught between the romanticized view of the digital age and a deep resentment towards it. After all, they witnessed almost the entire arc of the electronic world becoming digital. But the point is that the Machine plotted this takeover since the begining, and we gradually surrendered our data, our ad preferences, our attention spans, even our very thoughts to it. Now it’s too late to regret. It was all our fault.

And CGI in movies – especially the kind championed by big-studio superhero and sci-fi films in the twenty-first century – did a great deal to normalize a horrendous artificiality that now seems to permeate the whole visual field. And that was before AI became a thing. Ugly CGI paved the way for even uglier AI, and the unlucky people caught in the middle were treated the way machines treat humans in dystopian fiction: they were discarded.