The mystery of Amazon Freevee's A.I.-generated 12 Angry Men poster

We’ve reached an inflection point in our culture where tech and entertainment companies are doubling down on incorporating artificial intelligence into their platforms. Among the many murky problems with this is that A.I. isn’t very intelligent or sophisticated (at least not yet). Google’s A.I. Overview has fed users bizarre, incorrect, and sometimes even slightly dangerous answers. And as we’ve seen time and again, A.I. artwork is still usually pretty bizarre, with a poor grasp on human figures and surreal interpretations of basic prompts. The latter scenario is what we’re dealing with regarding Amazon Freevee’s A.I. generated 12 Angry Men poster.

This week, some eagle-eyed fan found that the poster for the 1957 classic 12 Angry Men on Amazon’s interface was not the poster for 12 Angry Men. This was quickly confirmed by other users, as well as The A.V. Club. The image is very obviously incorrect at first glance; there are way more than 12 men in that room! Even worse, many of the faces are twisted, melting, and inhuman. Most of the background faces can’t even really be called faces at all.

This has been misattributed by some Twitter/X users as an issue on Amazon’s Prime Video, but the incorrect A.I. poster is actually on Amazon’s FAST channel (free ad-supported streaming TV), Freevee. Though they’re owned by the same parent company, Prime Video has a real poster for the Henry Fonda-fronted film. This discrepancy between the two posters seems to be a licensing rights issue. A source explained to The A.V. Club that the service licenses 12 Angry Men from a third party, which is responsible for the images that accompany the film. Though MGM (which is owned by Amazon) seems to have some form of distribution rights for 12 Angry Men, older movies have more complicated licensing stemming from third-party distribution deals and Blu-ray and DVD remasterings. Still, it’s puzzling that in this situation the licensing would provide rights for the movie, but not the poster. The streamer has reportedly reached out to the third-party service to have the image changed, though as of this writing the A.I. image is still on Freevee’s site.

12 Angry Men appears to be one of, if not the only title on the platform with an A.I. poster. Upon The A.V. Club’s investigation, we couldn’t find any other artwork that was so obviously A.I. generated. Most of the films from the 1950s used the original illustrated posters. Some of them looked strangely edited, like a Seven Year Itch poster with text that looked like Microsoft WordArt, but the illustration didn’t appear to be A.I. (Those older films are also presumably licensed from third parties.) For what it’s worth, the 1997 12 Angry Men starring Jack Lemmon is also streaming on Freevee, and it has a real still from the movie as its poster.

This is not the first time an Amazon streaming service has been accused of using A.I. for its artwork. Last year, fans called out a teaser image for Prime Video’s Fallout for not using a real illustrator, as the image had some hallmarks of A.I. (Human figures with multiple legs, cars that are designed backwards, a tree trunk disappearing into a building, etc.) Of course it’s not a surprise that such a thing would occur, as film and television execs have long signaled their desire to cut costs using A.I.

But the Fallout poster was for a new show, and the 12 Angry Men image is obviously an old film that, crucially, has real posters using both illustration and movie stills available for use. Maybe this situation is just a strange blip with a third-party on a free-tier streamer, but it makes you wonder what the future of A.I. truly is. Do we now have to worry that images we know and are familiar with are going to be replaced by A.I. generated ones? It’s a chilling prospect that portends an ugly and inhuman future.