Marvel’s now-standard animated opening TV credits might look a little different on their latest series, Secret Invasion. That’s because this new opening sequence was created using artificial intelligence. It’s like an actual secret invasion, only not involving shapeshifting aliens.
Secret Invasion executive producer Ali Selim confirmed that surprising detail to Polygon, saying that it was not a cost-cutting measure or a last-minute decision; using AI to generate an opening title sequence felt like a choice that suited the aesthetics and themes of a show about a group of alien invaders hiding amongst the human population.
“When we reached out to the AI vendors,” Selim told them “that was part of it — it just came right out of the shape-shifting, Skrull world identity, you know? Who did this? Who is this?”
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Selim said that the process of making an AI-generated opening worked thusly:
We would talk to them about ideas and themes and words, and then the computer would go off and do something. And then we could change it a little bit by using words, and it would change.
The first time I watched the Secret Invasion opening credits, they didn’t necessarily stand out to me, but rewatching them after learning this information, it does make a little sense. A lot of the images are just the tiniest bit off, in a way that you sometimes seen in AI art. It’s close to a piece of art a human would create, but something about the likenesses, the anatomy, the style, just seems vaguely inhuman, like it was made by someone who didn’t know what people looked like. That does sort of match the Secret Invasion concept.
The first episode of Marvel’s Secret Invasion is now streaming on Disney+.
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