A24, the studio that built its entire brand on being the tasteful one, the label cinephiles trust to care about craft, got caught this week doing the least tasteful thing imaginable: putting out promotional posters that were obviously, sloppily AI-generated, complete with the tell-tale errors these image tools still cannot help producing. Fans clocked a building sitting on the wrong side of the Chicago skyline, a swan floating incongruously in the middle of a river, and cars missing their doors. The connoisseur’s studio, undone by a machine that does not know how many doors a car has.
The backlash was swift and merciless, because A24’s whole proposition is that it is better than this. When a bargain-bin brand uses cheap AI art, nobody blinks. When the studio that markets itself as the guardian of real filmmaking gets caught feeding its key art through the same slop machine to save a few quid, it reads as a betrayal of the exact thing it sells. The errors are funny. The hypocrisy is the actual story. You cannot spend a decade positioning yourself as the antidote to soulless corporate cinema and then let an image model draw your posters because a human designer costs money.
The wider lesson is about where the slop tide is now reaching. It was easy to assume generative junk would stay at the cheap end of the market: dropshipping ads, content farms, spam. A24 getting caught means it has crept into the premium tier too, into the marketing of companies whose customers specifically pay for the human touch. The tools are good enough to tempt everyone and still bad enough to embarrass anyone, which is the worst possible combination for a brand built on taste. Somewhere, a laid-off poster designer is laughing into their pint.
Sources: BuzzFeed, industry reporting, September 2026. Related: why AI labels and disclosures keep failing.