Writing the roman numeral IIII instead of IV is not uncommon on clocks: https://www.deutsches-uhrenmuseum.de/en/museum/knowledge/clock-facts/clock-dials-with-4-iiii-or-iv.html
Well TIL.
At the very least they should have tried to fix “IIII” to “IV.”
IIII is normal on clocks. There is nothing to fix here.
Big whoop.
Indeed. Even if it’s true… so?
Gizmodo, and all the Gawker, G/O Media brands, have been trash for years. If I was in charge here, they’d be banned.
The way it was discovered was what interested me more. They made a really stupid mistake that should have gotten caught at some point in the process. It’s about as blatant an error as there could be for a clock background image.
Clocks use IIII instead of IV most of the time. This is completely normal and not at all out of place
I don’t know why Gizmodo is so fixated on the IIII, which as many people have pointed out is fairly common on clocks. Twitter/X is a nightmare to navigate in a browser, but the much better article on The Verge doesn’t even mention the Roman numeral. The AI origins of the background come from a lot of other evidence.
TL;DR: It used this stock image which 𝕏 users believe is AI art.
Only 10 users? Seemed like a bigger deal.
That doesn’t even look AI generated. It has legible letters in it.
Alright, and? If the entire image were AI-generated, then I would see an issue here, but a real artist was still involved and the end result is by far transformative enough that it shouldn’t matter, and stock photos are used all the time in graphics work like this
This is the best summary I could come up with:
At first glance it looks fine; maybe it even fits into the out-of-this-plane oddness associated with Loki and the Time Variance Authority.
But take a closer look—disconnected lines, strange digital artifacts, symbols that seem to be utterly formless, and… the Roman numeral “IIII.” Well, that’s not right, is it?
The user, Svarun, has a massive stock of photos that are also more or less AI soup, and while there is some plausible deniability here, any graphic designer worth their salt should have been able to figure out that the “Time Spiral” didn’t look right.
Additional reporting from the Verge notes that Shutterstock requires users to categorize any AI stock with special tags.
These suspicions come after Marvel’s highly criticized decision to use AI-generated opening credits for previous Disney+ series Secret Invasion.
In an interview with Polygon, Secret Invasion’s directer-showrunner Ali Selim admitted he didn’t “really understand” how AI generated images work.
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