Spider-Man: Brand New Day, the latest Marvel Cinematic Universe flick with an estimated budget of roughly $225 million, officially crossed the $2 billion worldwide earnings mark at the box office this week. Keep both of those figures in mind while you continue reading, as a new book featuring official Spider-Man: Brand New Day concept art just hit store shelves on Tuesday, and it quite blatantly features AI-generated artwork.
As originally spotted by The Artbook Collector in a post on X, one of the images in Spider-Man: Brand New Day – The Art of the Movie, a concept art book published by Marvel that was released on August 18, is a completely garbled mess.
A random, splotchy, half-formed taxi in the dead center of the page, a distorted mess of stairs, and a warped building that looks as if it’s folding in on itself—all classic telltale signs of lazy, AI-generated slop.
*Important please read.
In a mistake I won’t make again, I initially glanced over an image in Spider-Man: Brand New Day – The Art of the Movie, but after speaking with multiple artists, in my opinion it looks like it was made using AI.The image seen below has warped taxis and… pic.twitter.com/IiPxi8tCPC
— The Artbook Collector (@theartbookguy) August 20, 2026
There are so many offensively terrible things to say about this that I’m not even sure where to start, but I sure as hell wouldn’t be happy about spending $50 on this “art” book only to find out that it features AI-generated images.
But the more immediate issue is that, back in mid-April, Disney fired over 1,000 staff members at Marvel Studios, and its visual effects department was hit the hardest by the layoffs. Pretty easy to figure out why they chose to fire so many of the MCU’s concept artists when they clearly planned to save a few bucks by AI-generating some slop instead.
But if Disney and Sony were willing to spend, at minimum, over $200 million to produce Spider-Man: Brand New Day, couldn’t they have dug into the couch cushions for some extra cash and actually, I dunno, paid some real, human artists to produce the concept art instead? Especially considering they got all that sweet BMW money from pushing adverts into people’s cars. Just a pathetically embarrassing situation for everyone involved.