Official Thunderbolts poster has fans arguing over whether one of the Thunderbolts has an unwelcome sixth finger
The AI alarms are sounding, but this one seems relatively benign.
Update: Claims of the image being AI-doctored appear to have been wide of the mark: this may just be a good old-fashioned optical illusion. The headline and some elements of the copy have been changed to more accurately reflect this.
Original story: The internet's collective head is on a swivel these days for even the slightest whiff of AI intervention in art, and for good reason: Apparently not even big-budget productions from Marvel are immune to dodgy-looking art seeing official use, as evidenced by a new poster for the Thunderbolts that at first glance appears to feature a character with six fingers on one hand.
Yep, look there on the bottom left: sure looks like a dude with six fingers, and as Gamespot points out, that character (Bob) has five fingers in a teaser for the film.
Assuming Marvel isn't teasing a third act twist where this one particular Thunderbolt sprouts a new digit, the poster shared by the official Marvel Twitter and Instagram accounts today appears altered from its intended appearance. Interestingly, that version is the only version with the error. A more narrow version of the poster that cuts off before the apparent sixth finger appeared in Marvel's official blog post alongside the new teaser.
As weird as the bonus finger is, it does seem to be some sort of unintended optical illusion, possibly down to some re-sizing around the digits. A possible explanation is that someone's done a dodgy Photoshop while resizing the standard poster for other formats, but it seems unlikely this is the work of generative AI.
The posters with the possible phantom finger remain online at the time of writing with no comment from Marvel as of yet. You can watch the teaser trailer for Thunderbolts* below (wow, that asterisk is actually part of the title).
The biggest gaming news, reviews and hardware deals
Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team.
Morgan has been writing for PC Gamer since 2018, first as a freelancer and currently as a staff writer. He has also appeared on Polygon, Kotaku, Fanbyte, and PCGamesN. Before freelancing, he spent most of high school and all of college writing at small gaming sites that didn't pay him. He's very happy to have a real job now. Morgan is a beat writer following the latest and greatest shooters and the communities that play them. He also writes general news, reviews, features, the occasional guide, and bad jokes in Slack. Twist his arm, and he'll even write about a boring strategy game. Please don't, though.