Amazon’s First Fallout Series Visual Is Full Of Bizarre Errors

Was this image created by an artificial intelligence to promote the new show from the creators of Westworld?

At the very beginning of 2022, we learned that Amazon had hired the co-creator of WestworldJonathan Nolan, to direct the first episode ofa serial adaptation of fallout, the hit video game from Bethesda. Christopher Nolan’s brother is also executive producer of this post-apocalyptic show with his partner Lisa Joy. Geneva Robertson-Dworet (Captain Marvel, Tomb Raider) and Graham Wagner (The Office) were commissioned to write the screenplay for fallout to turn it into a big-budget series for Prime Video.

Since its announcement, the series started filming this year with Kyle MacLachlan, Xelia Mendes-Jones, Aaron Moten, Ella Purnell and Walton Goggins in the cast, but like many current projects in Hollywood, this one is currently on hiatus, due to the strike of actors and writers . Its broadcast is scheduled for 2024, without further details: we will certainly know more once the negotiations between the unions and the bosses of the big studios and streaming services have been completed.

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To keep fans of the game waiting, Prime Video shared a first official visual of Fallout – the series, taking advantage of Gamescom 2023 to remind that this project was in the making. This is not an image of the filming, but a drawing, where we find one of the key characters of the games, Vault Boy, thumbs up and smiling in front of a landscape that seems straight from a postcard of Los Angeles in the 1950s. “Where Dreams Come True”we read below the name of the city.

Except that on closer inspection, this drawing is riddled with strange errors: the woman directly behind him has three legs (and she walks on the sidewalk or the road? The composition of the premises is unclear), the palm tree across the street has a huge trunk that is not perfectly connected to its leaves at the top of the building (which has zero windows, just a block sitting there and too small for the size of the vehicles ), the car in the foreground seems to be driving towards the city, like those before it… except that its lights are reversed and its steering wheel is fixed on the wrong side, towards the spectators!

Kotaku scrutinized this visual to spot everything that was wrong, while wondering if the image had not been created by an artificial intelligence, so many errors are there. New technologies make it possible to design images according to human demands, but they still don’t create their visuals as perfectly as real artists: often it’s details that are off, like six-fingered hands or melted-down elements. to each other, for example. The way of representing cars upside down but with a steering wheel in the foreground is thus a typical error of current software which would have been asked: “draw me a road in Los Angeles in the 1950s.”

“Amazon (which has $514 billion in revenue) is unable to hire a real artist”, gets angry a developer named Kenney on social networks. It was his tweet that prompted Kotaku to post these screenshots, which do indeed show all sorts of blunders once you pay attention.

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The misuse of AI is one of the issues raised by the strikers, even if the unions are campaigning above all for better pay. The development of numerous AIs, making it possible to create a maximum of things with a minimum of human commitment, worries, and is openly denounced, at a time when scandals are multiplying.

The bodies of extras can be scanned in order to reuse their image without having to pay them in the future (this is the case for productions Star Wars, among others). Software for writing first drafts of screenplays is also criticized in Hollywood, as is the use of these new technologies to produce entire credits, such as that of Secret Invasion, one of Disney+’s recent Marvel series, for example. So many exploitations of artificial intelligence that serve artists, less hired at the expense of this kind of new services, while the companies that use them make enormous profits thanks to their films and series.

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