Officials behind the Winter Olympic Games have confirmed to Metro that controversial promotional images were edited with AI tools.
Over the last few days, social media users have accused the official Olympics’ X account of posting ‘AI slop’.
The posts have included posters featuring miniature athletes playing sports on food and a cartoon of actor Sabrina Impacciatore skiing.
But X users have criticised the ‘lazy’ images, alleging they were digitally rendered rather than designed by humans.
‘What’s with the GenAI slopfest? said one user, referring to generative AI. ‘Hire an actual artist, you cheap [clowns].’
Another added: ‘The games for human excellence being represented by no-effort, anti-human AI slop.’
Some pointed out that the images appear to clash with the Olympics’ guidelines about its rings, which say the symbol should not be altered.
One poster, which shows an athlete riding a penne pasta as a bobsleigh,shows the Olympic yellow ring not overlapping the black ring.
In response to a cartoon graphic of Impacciatore, meanwhile, a user pointed out that the rings appeared almost smeared.
Dr Talent Moyo, an expert in sports business management at Birmingham City University, told Metro that the Olympic rings are a symbol of ‘unity’.
‘Changing any branding elements of the Olympic Games could do some permanent damage to the brand image,’ Dr Moyo said.
‘The tells are all there’, says AI image expert
Metro also asked a tech expert to run the posters through their AI detection tool, which uses algorithms to pick up on tiny signs that distinguish images made with computers from those by humans.
Nick Knupffer, the co-founder of VerifyLabs.AI, said: ‘On the whole, the posters themselves look like they are mostly made by a human but the images in the middle are AI.
‘Either Midjourney or Stable Diffusion, definitely not Nano Banana, Adobe Firefly or anything else typically used.’
Nathan Marlor, head of data and AI at Version 1, said the telltale signs of an image being synthetically rendered ‘are all there’ on the Impacciatore graphic.
Generative AI creates content, like images, by identifying patterns in data and then producing original material that has similar characteristics.
An example of this, Marlor says, is that a billboard behind Impacciatore appears to be based on a poster for the 1936 Nazi-sponsored Olympics in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany.
‘No sane designer, no human with even a passing knowledge of Olympic history, would drop that into a feel-good ceremony montage,’ Marlor says.
‘But an AI model doesn’t know what 1936 means. It just knows “Winter Olympics poster” and grabs what fits the aesthetic.’
What did the Olympics say?
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) confirmed to Metro that the posters were designed by a team of 12 over four months.
The team included a creative director, art director, copywriter, designer, illustrator and visual artist.
A spokesperson added: ‘It took many hours of hands-on work, from the first concepts through to final production.
‘A combination of tools and techniques were used. AI tools were used at different stages in the process, both during early sketching and illustration.
‘Each visual was then developed, refined and transformed through extensive manual work by professional creatives, shaped by artistic judgement, feedback and careful craft.
‘The posters follow the IOC brand and digital guidelines, which are constantly and rapidly evolving to adapt to the fast pace of the social media world.’
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