Why True Detective Episode 2 Has A Strange AI-Generated Concert Poster

For critics of "True Detective: Night Country," the latest episode has given them yet another reason to be skeptical: In the background of a conversation between Officer Navarro and suspect Chuck, there were two posters that looked like they were made with AI. 

Almost immediately after the episode aired, the internet picked up on it. "What's up with these posters?" one redditor asked on the "True Detective" subreddit, spurring a lively round of critical speculation. Although the first poster turns out to be legitimate, the second poster has multiple blatant mistakes that seemingly out it as being AI-created. There's the fact that the KISS-inspired band on the poster is just called "Metal," or that "2nd" is typed out as "2st," or that the poster is supposedly announcing a concert tour but fails to say anything about when and where the concerts take place. 

It's also sparked discussion on Twitter, with one user lamenting, "I can't imagine putting together a mystery/encouraging paying attention, then putting this on a wall. Lack of care! Feels like details don't matter as much as we believed." New showrunner Issa López saw the tweet soon after, however, and responded with her own explanation:

"The idea is that it's so sad up there that some kid with AI made the posters for a loser Metal festival for boomers. It was discussed. Ad nauseam."

When another Twitter user pointed out that the poster doesn't say anything useful about where to attend the concert, she responded, "Exactly! Chat GPT came as we were shooting. So, we were — feeling not kind towards AI." López replied to another post about the issue, saying, "The story behind that poster is so long, it would require its own season of TD."

These responses from López are admittedly a little vague and confusing; for viewers who hate the idea of AI being used in TV or film, we'd be more than happy to listen to the full story of how the poster was made, no matter how long it would take. We still don't know if the poster was actually made with AI, or if it was handmade with the intention of appearing like it was made with AI. The most likely explanation is that it was a little bit of both: The artwork looks like something AI would make, but because AI image generators generally don't produce actual text, it seems likely the words on the poster were added on by actual humans. The idea that the writers were out to criticize AI makes sense, because some of these typos (like "2st" instead of "1st") are mistakes an AI likely wouldn't even make.

Another point in the show's favor, countering the idea that this new season isn't as detail-focused as it was under the previous showrunner, is how the heads in the poster all sort of blur together. Combined with the icy background, it seems to really echo the disturbing corpsicle of frozen, thawing humans that make up this season's main mystery. If nothing else, the poster subtly reinforces the stakes of Navarro's visit to Chuck, the owner of the poster. Throughout his tense conversation with Navarro, looming behind him is the quiet reminder of the horrors that visited the research scientists, and that might even visit our main characters someday soon.

The other argument in the poster's defense is that it ties in neatly with one of the season's big themes, that there's something deeply wrong in Ennis, Alaska. With the constant hints of the supernatural and the implications that the research scientists discovered something existentially devastating, "Night Country" has constantly blurred the line between what's real and what isn't. Several characters have already had moments where they couldn't trust their own eyes; the disconcertingly unnatural poster in Chuck's bedroom is just an extension of this. 

López's assertion that the poster was designed to show "how sad" life is up in Ennis also checks out, since Chuck is clearly written as a miserable character. He's strongly on the side of the mining corporation that's ruining the town's water supply, and like Danvers, he doesn't seem to have any strong native roots to the area. He's someone with no real respect for nature, nor does he seem to care much about Annie K's murder. The idea that he'd put up an AI poster in his room, or that he's so artistically incurious that he wouldn't be able to tell the difference between a real poster and a fake one, fits his character well.

Although including AI in the background of the show is still pretty questionable, at least it's clear that the writers did so with intentionality. Rather than try to slip AI in and pass it off as the real thing, they instead drew attention to it and used the fake poster to tell us more about the character it belongs to. We still don't know exactly how much of this poster was made through AI, but at least we now know that the choice wasn't motivated by laziness or greed, as many viewers feared.