On April 17, the Wednesday after the film released, Civil War’s official Instagram page released five artificially generated images imagining the impacts of the war it depicts. The film is set mostly across the backroads of northern Pennsylvania and West Virginia, but the images depict urban disaster zones in the hearts of San Francisco, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Chicago and Miami. Between the apparent false advertising and the use of generative imagery, there’s a lot to unpack here, and since we try to look at movies not just as art but as corporate products, I thought it was important to jot something down-

Civil War is a masterpiece of human determination and hard-heartedness set against the backdrop of a new American civil war that has arguably already started. It’s an arthouse film about people, not politics, and it’s left many mainstream viewers expecting a war epic disappointed. It only has one scene of warfare, an astonishing extended climax as the Western Forces of California and Texas storm Washington D.C., but the rest of it is set in forest clearings they found near Atlanta. The film also denies detail about how this war started – like the reporters it follows, it takes a non-judgmental approach to the conflict, which can be frustrating to people who don’t share it.

Seeing images that propose an expansive film with more battle scenes and perhaps a more detailed fictional history must feel like salting the wound for viewers who feel cheated in these ways. Having actually paid attention in the theater and understanding the politics and geography it depicts, I also find these choices questionable – California and Florida are advancing in the film, so it feels unlikely Miami, Los Angeles or San Francisco ever saw any violence.

The film’s politics are completely clear if you’re actually paying attention to them, of course, but that’s a different post.

It’s not unheard of for movies to use abstract posters that represent the idea of their film more than any individual scene in their marketing. These purely thematic bombshells promoting mother! from back in 2017 spring to mind, but we don’t have to go far to find a good example – the main poster of Civil War, which depicts a sniper’s nest inside the Statue of Liberty’s torch, is also not shown in the film. The main IMAX poster also shows helicopters and military watercraft surrounding the iconic statue, which is not shown once in the film.

The choice to release these posters the Wednesday after the movie’s hit theaters, waiting after opening weekend and after standard Tuesday discount ticket nights, is also significant. Most movies make about half their money on opening weekend, with a higher ratio for blockbusters and movies that get poor reviews, so this specific leg of the advertising campaign – which you need to already be following the film’s social media to see – is aimed squarely at people who’ve already seen the movie and would know nothing like the scenes it depicts are in the film. That’s why the people griping about this are mostly doing so from the perspective of an already dissatisfied customer, but it also pokes a big hole in the idea that this represents false advertising.

The explosive news factor of this is the use of generative imagery models, which are commonly sold as “artificially intelligent,” to produce these posters – and not particularly careful use, either. The images feature errors like towers on the wrong side of the Chicago River, a car with three doors and what appears to be an actual giant swan instead of a swan-shaped paddleboat, errors you could describe as “bone-headed” if the images were made by a human person possessing a head. It screams that somebody high-up enough to get their ideas executed thought of this at the last minute.

“Artificially intelligent” generative models that spit out dozens of highly varied finished products in a matter of hours lend themselves inherently to the thought process of a corporate higher-up, which is the core reason why they’re being sold as hard as they are. They’re ideal tools for someone who’s used to looking only at finished products, nothing in-progress, who maybe doesn’t understand how that progress is made. They’re also great for producing finished products when you only have a vague idea of what you want, but nothing specific enough to actually start working on. Someone who this appeals to would also be less likely to notice the gaffs present in this set of posters, or even have the basic self-awareness to hire a human artist to re-make them from scratch without this sort of artifact. This is why generative imagery so often has these embarrassing signs – human error, specifically because the tools are only sold as error-proof and only bought by people who are fooled by that pitch and don’t search for those errors, possibly not even knowing how.

This sort of thought process, this attempt to make art without making any decisions, is fundamentally opposed to filmmaking, a process in which every detail is obsessed over from writing to production to the edit. Civil War specifically, which aspires to stretch its A24-record $50 million budget to make an IMAX war epic that can compete with other modern large-format films, is a film that has to get everything it can from shooting windows that are narrowed by a limited budget. Garland and company can’t spit out dozens of finished products for someone who’s never made a movie before to choose from, they have an actual piece of art that represents an actual investment, eight figures and months of blood, sweat and tears from hundreds of actual human beings.

The Hollywood Reporter’s story in relation to this ends by noting that Civil War writer/director Alex Garland’s directorial debut Ex Machina “warns of the dangers of AI,” and that’s probably the most telling detail about this mess. Ex Machina isn’t about artificial intelligence at all – it uses artificial intelligence, the traditional science-fiction concept of a self-sufficient machine who claims personhood, not this new wave of crap, to tell a story primarily about the urge to put women in little glass boxes – and this marketing story isn’t about artificial intelligence at all, it’s about generative image models. They may commonly be sold as “artificially intelligent,” but I’m still being careful to put that in quotes because it’s a salesmen’s lie. These things aren’t artificially intelligent in any way, shape or form.

AP Style tells us as journalists to not allow salesmen or ideologues to frame what they’re selling – the classic example is we describe people as “anti-abortion” or “pro-abortion rights,” using more clear language and denying the assumptions baked into the self-applied descriptions of “pro-life” and “pro-choice.” The media as an industry has largely failed to do this when confronted with these generative models, repeating the self-applied “artificial intelligence” framing apparently without a second thought, and it’s really poisoned our ability to talk about these tools.