Spider-Man art book: when clone-stamping reads as AI, a policy is not evidence

The publisher's defence and the fans' accusation describe the same picture. Taxis and buildings colliding into each other are what prompted the AI allegations ^[2]. The cloning tool and photobashing are what the book's publisher says produced them, alongside an admission of laziness and a denial of AI use ^[8]. Nobody is disputing the artifacts. The argument is only about which cheap process made them, and viewers have no way to tell from the page.

The most useful part of the response came from a Reddit user, StingRe, who says they did the layout and design for the book ^[9]. Their theory for the wonky taxi is a watermark sitting between two cabs: remove it, and Photoshop's fill tool closes the dead space with the nearest pixels, using a feature that has been in the product for over 15 years ^[16]. A tool that predates the technology it is being mistaken for is now indistinguishable from it at the pixel level.

The rest of the account is where anyone commissioning art should look. Assets reached the layout desk from the film's visual development team ^[10]. StingRe says they were told freelancers had used AI to populate backgrounds in their individual assets ^[13], and that anything flagged was either never supplied or removed ^[14]. The named safeguard is a person: Marvel visual development head Ryan Meinerding, described as very strict about checking every page for AI ^[15]. Even so, StingRe concedes something could have slipped through ^[4]. Checking finished pages by eye is the same procedure the fans ran, on the same evidence ^[6]. It can return a false positive on a taxi and a false negative on a freelancer's background, and here it may have done both.

The contracting posture is separate from the production one. StingRe's summary is that you do not legally own anything made by AI and that contracts require wholly original work ^[17], and that shortcuts are an individual decision rather than a company mandate ^[12]. That protects the studio's paperwork. It does nothing for the asset, which passed through at least three sets of hands before it was printed ^[7], none of whom appear to have shipped records with the file.

So the only rebuttal on offer was a pseudonymous account explaining Photoshop behaviour, with the relevant comments since deleted ^[14], while Meinerding and Disney have not spoken and io9's approach sits unanswered ^[3]. Nothing in the denial has been confirmed by a named party ^[5]. An anti-AI policy is a statement of intent. What this page needed was a receipt: retained layer stacks, the source plates the bash was built from, a delivery log per freelancer. That material is dull to keep and quick to produce, and it answers in an hour a question a policy cannot answer at all.