Creator says these posters are AI generated, but nobody on Facebook can read
Convincing fakes have been a threat since the advent of photography, so what’s shocking about a series of AI-generated Zelda posters making the rounds on social media is the number of people who have decided they’re real. At the time of writing, these fake images of an alleged Netflix-produced Zelda series have garnered nearly 30,000 shares, many of them from people who apparently consider them real. Come on people. The original post from creator Dan Leveille also says it’s fake!
I say this, but it is easy to see how people would have been deceived. Leveille has chosen some great A-list actors such as Tom Holland, Emma Watson and Idris Elba. Their faces are so familiar that they help sell the fantasy even if you don’t have the context to determine if a movie or TV series is in production. And if fans really want something to be true, they probably don’t think too much about hitting the “Share” button. But seriously, everyone. Leveille says in his third line: “JK. Made with #midjourney, painting with #dalle, some facial corrections with Tencent ARC and a lot of Photoshop “.
However, that didn’t stop fans from sharing the post without comment or tagging their friends in the repost. Many include eye, heart-eye or fire emoji. Others complained in the comments that Netflix was ruining their beloved franchise. Some racists snidely said the casting was wrong because Netflix used more actors of color.
Midjourney is an artificial intelligence lab that creates photo-generating software, and Dall-E is the name of software from another group that also creates images from text and artwork from of the web (and without the consent of the original artists). So at no time did Holland sit in Link’s cosplay for a photo. Even if they realize the images don’t represent the real thing, someone who’s not definitely online might assume they’re the product of simple image-editing software like Photoshop. But unlike traditional image editing software, it doesn’t require much training to create deepfakes, so we’ll see a lot more of these types of fakes in the future.
Poster creator Dan Leveille notified Kotaku of his lawsuit via email. He first created a command prompt for Midjourney. “In most cases, I ran the prompts over a hundred times, so I let them generate throughout the day,” he wrote. “The biggest challenge was getting the faces to look like the actors and then the characters. 95% of the time the face is not close enough to the actor.”
They solved this problem with a facial correction tool, then used Dall-E to “regenerate” some features. It fixed all remaining errors in Photoshop.
Léveillé has already made a poster of the film Zelda from the image of Tom Holland. Several news outlets picked up the story, and Google searches for “Netflix Zelda” exploded on September 25. Reports state that the posters were created using artificial intelligence, but Leveille managed to trick a genuine movie distribution company into showing the fake poster alongside upcoming productions such as The Witcher Season 3, Constantine 2 and Black Adam. Come on, all of you. Google exists!