The mystery of Amazon Freevee’s A.I.-generated 12 Angry Men poster
Fans noticed that Freevee had an A.I. image with 19 scary guys on it as the poster for 12 Angry Men
Aux News A.i.
We’ve reached an inflection point in our culture where tech and entertainment companies are doubling down on incorporating artificial intelligence into their platforms. Among the many murky problems with this is that A.I. isn’t very intelligent or sophisticated (at least not yet). Google’s A.I. Overview has fed users bizarre, incorrect, and sometimes even slightly dangerous answers. And as we’ve seen time and again, A.I. artwork is still usually pretty bizarre, with a poor grasp on human figures and surreal interpretations of basic prompts. The latter scenario is what we’re dealing with regarding Amazon Freevee’s A.I. generated 12 Angry Men poster.
This week, some eagle-eyed fan found that the poster for the 1957 classic 12 Angry Men on Amazon’s interface was not the poster for 12 Angry Men. This was quickly confirmed by other users, as well as The A.V. Club. The image is very obviously incorrect at first glance; there are way more than 12 men in that room! Even worse, many of the faces are twisted, melting, and inhuman. Most of the background faces can’t even really be called faces at all.
This has been misattributed by some Twitter/X users as an issue on Amazon’s Prime Video, but the incorrect A.I. poster is actually on Amazon’s FAST channel (free ad-supported streaming TV), Freevee. Though they’re owned by the same parent company, Prime Video has a real poster for the Henry Fonda-fronted film. This discrepancy between the two posters seems to be a licensing rights issue. A source explained to The A.V. Club that the service licenses 12 Angry Men from a third party, which is responsible for the images that accompany the film. Though MGM (which is owned by Amazon) seems to have some form of distribution rights for 12 Angry Men, older movies have more complicated licensing stemming from third-party distribution deals and Blu-ray and DVD remasterings. Still, it’s puzzling that in this situation the licensing would provide rights for the movie, but not the poster. The streamer has reportedly reached out to the third-party service to have the image changed, though as of this writing the A.I. image is still on Freevee’s site.
12 Angry Men appears to be one of, if not the only title on the platform with an A.I. poster. Upon The A.V. Club’s investigation, we couldn’t find any other artwork that was so obviously A.I. generated. Most of the films from the 1950s used the original illustrated posters. Some of them looked strangely edited, like a Seven Year Itch poster with text that looked like Microsoft WordArt, but the illustration didn’t appear to be A.I. (Those older films are also presumably licensed from third parties.) For what it’s worth, the 1997 12 Angry Men starring Jack Lemmon is also streaming on Freevee, and it has a real still from the movie as its poster.
This is not the first time an Amazon streaming service has been accused of using A.I. for its artwork. Last year, fans called out a teaser image for Prime Video’s Fallout for not using a real illustrator, as the image had some hallmarks of A.I. (Human figures with multiple legs, cars that are designed backwards, a tree trunk disappearing into a building, etc.) Of course it’s not a surprise that such a thing would occur, as film and television execs have long signaled their desire to cut costs using A.I.
But the Fallout poster was for a new show, and the 12 Angry Men image is obviously an old film that, crucially, has real posters using both illustration and movie stills available for use. Maybe this situation is just a strange blip with a third-party on a free-tier streamer, but it makes you wonder what the future of A.I. truly is. Do we now have to worry that images we know and are familiar with are going to be replaced by A.I. generated ones? It’s a chilling prospect that portends an ugly and inhuman future.
31 Comments
The thing I’m wondering is, did they generate the image automatically using an IMDB-style summary of the film (along with other metadata), or did someone type in a prompt manually? Are we going to see auto-generated AI art for entire streaming libraries? (The very idea makes me want to hurl…)
The mechanics of this are bizarre to me too. Regardless of how little effort goes into AI art, and clearly they didn’t even put in a baseline of effort here, it’s certainly more steps than just grabbing a still from a film.
Yeah considering Netflix has had tech to grab *specific kinds* of stills from a film for years now, I really don’t get why this was necessary. AI art for this kind of stuff makes no sense to me bc for you could just use a picture of the actual thing.
Probably autogenerated from a prompt culled from the metadata of the film (and “like this [original image]”)
…many of the faces are twisted, melting, and inhuman.That’s just what anger will do to you.
19 Angry Plastic Surgery Fails
The room’s so absurdly full too. Maybe the other men are angry bc they can’t reach the table
i knew this tech would only manifest itself in the most annoying ways.
For now, I’m just trying to be happy that this is likely bringing the film attention from a lot of younger people who may have never heard of it, and they get to be introduced to truly one of the greats of all time.
I don’t go back and rewatch stuff that often any more, but 12 Angry Men is one I do hit every couple of years.
Yeah I love that movie. It’s a who’s who of phenomenal character actors plus Henr Fonda and then Lumet’s increasingly claustrophobic direction really adds to the whole thing. It’s a really great play/movie.
Don’t they have to read the play in high school any more?
They look the greedy family that got pig-faced after wearing those masks on the original Twilight Zone.
They’re wearing the same expression; getting Mr. Smith vibes from the third Matrix film.
Sure they claim AI can’t creat anything but here it is, Making 19 Angry Men.
It’s more than 12, so it’s AUTOMATICALLY better.
I’m surprised it didn’t somehow be like one of those marvel posters where its a bunch of heads (maybe with torsos) of various sizes in proportion to their importance to the plot
And one with Jack Klugman looking back over his shoulder so we can see his sweet ass.
This is Ed Begley Sr erasure and I won’t stand for it.
A comment called him Ed Vaguely Sr. Lol
I wanted to post Zorak’s Jack Klugman revolution from Space Ghost Coast to Coast, but it’s apparently been scrubbed from the internet. Anyway, just imagine Zorak repeating “Klug-Man!” as defiant chant.
It’s the thought that counts
well, now you’re just making me want to watch this movie
I wonder how “eagle-eyed” you’d have to be to notice that one of those angry men in the poster is a bit different from the others that actually appear in the movie?
You mean that there are 19 of them? And some have blurred, inhuman faces? Not too terribly eagle-eyed, probably.
“Still, it’s puzzling that in this situation the licensing would provide rights for the movie, but not the poster.”I would have thought the trailer is public domain,* therefore they could take an image from the trailer, slap some text on it, and bingo-bango there’s your thumbnail. (I am not a lawyer, in case that’s not obvious.)*New trailers are protected under current law, but it used to be that creative works had to be officially registered and have valid copyright notices on them, and trailers generally did not because studios did not consider them that important.
Interesting. On a related note, just yesterday author John Scalzi answered a question on BlueSky from a reader about why the cover art for the large-print edition of one of his novels was different from the original. Scalzi said that the large-print edition was published by a third party which licenses the text from his primary publisher. That license only covers the text of the book; if they wanted to use the same cover art, they’d have to license it separately, and so they provide their own cover art instead, presumably to save money.
12 AIngry Men.
they could have just a chunk of text. i mean a black and white picture of a 1957 film as a preview is just not appealing for most.
No one’s bothered by the fact it also lists one of the genres as “action”? 12 Angry Men is about as far from the action genre as a movie can get.
Given the amount of overheated energy on display, the movie would be more accurately titled, “12 Acting Men.”