I would normally never, ever even think of review bombing like this, but I'm heartbroken and furious. While in the taxi on the way to go and see this movie at the cinema, I learned that it contains several AI generated images. I sat and watched it anyway because my ticket was prepaid and I couldn't afford to waste that taxi fare either. I'm genuinely crying as I write this. I'm ashamed that my time and money has gone towards funding and enabling this.

I'm a stereotypical starving artist and I can't afford to go out very often. I took art commission work specifically for the purpose of funding my travel to watch this absolute insult. I scraped coins together to be slapped in the face and shown just how little my craft is valued anymore.

Some people on social media have been asking the question that maybe the producers had no choice due to budget constraints, and that's factually not true. Graphic design, photo editing, and artwork was also frequently featured alongside the AI images.

There was an intermission screen that was just a generic 70's wavy graphic design, and it could've been reused a couple more times. During the movie's prologue, what seemed to be a genuine piece of commissioned art was shown (the boxing match cartoon, for everyone who's seen it), and thirdly because of the movie's mockumentary found-footage style, a lot of edited faux photos were featured. But then that just makes me wonder how many of those images were also edited with AI, instead of people who know how to photo edit. It makes me wonder if AI was even used in the damn script. I thought that owl logo on the stage door looked suspicious as hell, too. Just how deep does this go?

We've only been able to catch the most egregious instances, but the possibility that there was so much more of this going on under the surface was all I could think about while watching this movie.

The option to hire artists, or work with what they had if money really was an issue, was there. And it purposefully wasn't taken.

The acting was great, it was really witty and funny, I wish I never spent money to go and see this. Being an artist has never felt so hopeless.

Edit: I've come across a couple of instances of people reposting my review to the tune of ''this guy needs to touch grass'', and I'm really not sorry for having a passionate reaction to paying to sit down and have ''illustration isn't a valued craft and is dangerously close to being replaced by technology that's built on ripping it off for the sake of convenience and profit'' blasted into my eyeballs. I made peace with the idea of not being able to turn my art into a viable career years ago, but I'm furious for my peers who are in this for the long run, and constantly have to navigate and protest against new forms of exploitation. I care about human creativity, self expression, and storytelling more than anything else in the world. I always have and always will. If I'm cringe for crying over the existential nightmare of it all (or for *thinking* this situation is an existential nightmare), that's fine with me.