The Devil Wears Prada 2 hired a real human artist to make its AI slop

Per Deadline, the artist herself, Alexis Franklin, posted about being hired by director David Frankel to create the meme, writing that, “I think these companies should get their flowers when they hire an artist.” (Franklin has, of course, since had to fend off accusations from random internet rabble that she herself is some kind of AI construct, because the internet is a sort of never-ending matryoshka doll of shitty takes.) Posting on Twitter, Franklin described her process for capturing the slopitude of it all, writing, “Obviously it looks AI-esque because I was hired to create a meme, not necessarily a painting, and since the image would not be on screen long, I kind of deployed a ‘logo’ state of mind—it needed to be immediately readable as clearly doctored and fake, because that’s the joke, so I didn’t go heavy on the brush strokes or ‘artistry’ of it. But the response to this has been so interesting. ‘You nailed the AI slop of it!’ is such a harrowing compliment.”

There are a lot of jokes circulating online this weekend about how low the bar has gotten in terms of praising studios for resisting AI pressure, but, seriously: It would have been pretty damn easy for Disney to boil a small lake to just crap out something thoughtless for these purposes—flying blithely in the face of the actual movie’s staunch anti-AI stance—so seeing Frankel and the studio invest in human work to make some artisanal, bespoke AI meme slop is genuinely kind of fascinating.