Posted in: Amazon Studios, Movies, Opinion, TV, TV | Tagged: avengers: doomsday, doctor who, opinion, the boys
Doctor Who’s Paul McGann and Billie Piper, The Boys: Vought Rising’s Jensen Ackles, and Avengers: Doomsday were the focus of a recent wave of AI-created “image leaks.”
Bleeding Cool is reporting it here first, folks. Exclusive! As production on Marvel Studios’ Avengers: Doomsday rolls on, we have photographic evidence that Paul McGann’s Doctor and Billie Piper’s Rose Tyler/Doctor from Doctor Who, and Jensen Ackles’ Soldier Boy from Prime Video’s The Boys and the upcoming The Boys: Vought Rising, are joining Robert Downey Jr’s Doctor Doom – here’s our behind-the-scenes proof… now bring us a million hits!!!
If you’ve been on social media over the past few days and your news-hungry geeks like we are, you may have seen this weird, sudden wave of image leaks from “behind the scenes” and “on the set during filming.” We mentioned Doctor Who, “Vought Rising,” and “Doomsday” because those are the top three examples that we’ve seen over the past few days, but there have been others. The good news? It’s still AI shit. For example, the image of Ackles as Soldier Boy couldn’t stay consistent when it came to the Vought symbol, and Soldier Boy had more buckles on his uniform than Marvel Comics’ Cable had pouches in the ’90s. Also, the more characters in the image, the less life-like they look and more like they stepped out of Soundgarden’s “Black Hole Sun” music video.
The bad news? The AI shit is getting better and better each and every day – which makes what we do that much more difficult and doesn’t make it any easier for the geek community to know what’s real and what’s nothing more than a steaming pile of clickbait. Let’s set aside the fact that generative AI is basically stealing other people’s work and frankensteining it into something that people then want to pass off as original art. Because that’s what it is. Consider this a mid-editorial intervention. Again, setting aside the bad rep AI already has, why would you want to compound it by showing how easily AI can fuck up something as enjoyable as being a geek? For some cheap clicks?
We hear from fans constantly about how they appreciate coverage of films, shows, comics, video games, and more from a third-party perspective (sites like Bleeding Cool) and that they don’t have to rely solely on press releases from studios and streamers. When one or two sites start peddling AI fan-fetishism and passing it off as fact (or possibly as fact, to give themselves some cover when it falls apart), it won’t take long for the domino effect to kick in. And when that happens, no one wins. So, the next time you see an image online of Christopher Eccleston and Russell T. Davies high-fiving with William Shatner behind the scenes while on the set of the Doctor Who 2026 Christmas Special, maybe pause for a second and get a second opinion.
