Netflix's "Two Cities" promotional image was accused of being generated by AI, Riot Games expressed its stance

Another day, another generative AI furore, this time involving a promotional image for the anime The Battle of Two Castles, based on the League of Legends. The image appeared as a thumbnail on the streaming app and was removed by Netflix after viewers pointed out some oddities that clearly pointed to machine creation.

It started with eggbertith sharing a screenshot on X (Twitter) noticing something odd about Jinx's hands in a banner image. Immediately people suspected it was AI-generated content, and Riot Games effectively confirmed it, apparently not happy about it as much as the audience.

"Thanks for bringing this to our attention," Alex Shahmiri, brand manager at Riot Games, wrote on Twitter. "We have a strict stance against the use of AI in anything related to Two Cities as it is disrespectful to the incredible artists who worked on the show. This image was a mistake and has been taken down. Thanks again for pointing it out."

By all accounts, this wasn’t a mistake on Riot’s part: it appears that someone at Netflix took an existing piece of Two Towers art and used Photoshop’s Generative Fill tool (or something similar) to expand it so that it would work for a banner.

Here is the original image, which can still be found online:

And this is the image after being processed by a machine - the resolution is lower, and the hand is obviously deformed:

This isn’t strictly “AI-generated art,” but it’s certainly done in an extremely perfunctory way, and that’s a problem in itself: Media companies that should know better seem to have put so much faith in the magic of AI that no one bothered to pay attention to the results.