Even Superman and the Fantastic Four are afraid of AI

“Disrupted” is the blog on innovation and AI transformation coordinated by Gianmario Verona.

Superman struggles internationally at the box office, the trailers for Fantastic Four: First Steps seem to disappoint Marvel fans, and Avengers: Doomsday has now been postponed to December 2026, after previously being slated for release ahead of Spiderman: Brand New Day, scheduled for July 31, 2026. One might wonder: Is all this digital transformation really good for the movie industry?

For those who aren’t fans of the genre and are about to scroll away, it’s worth pointing out one thing. Since the public debut of ChatGPT and its siblings, the entertainment and media industry has experienced the most dramatic shift brought by the technological transformation that has been accelerating since the early 2000s. In short, it’s a great observation deck to understand where we might be headed across many sectors.

While manufacturing and service industries looked on with skepticism at Amazon’s slow rise in the then-nascent world of e-commerce (long before big tech and weddings in Venice… Bezos looked like a delusional David facing the Goliath of global distribution that was Walmart, in a financial climate that, in 2001, wiped out nearly all dotcoms soon after their IPO), content producers had to roll up their sleeves from day one.

First, we started reading newspapers online, then we shared MP3s on Napster and bought songs for the iPod (considered a new kind of Walkman) and eventually we began renting them from the endless libraries of Spotify and Apple Music. We abandoned Blockbuster and traditional TV and began watching movies (or rather, TV series) on platforms like Sky, Netflix, and Prime Video. Not exactly a walk in the park for media and entertainment operators, who in less than fifteen years had to reorganize and shift from being industrial goods producers (newspapers, records, films) with a complex supply chain (involving suppliers, manufacturers, wholesalers, retailers) to fully-fledged service platforms (content available on digital devices of increasingly strange shapes and sizes).

Not an easy task, especially for those whose job is to innovate. In the content industry, innovation is everything! Historically protected by copyright laws but also by the rough paper of newspapers and the packaging of vinyls, CDs, and DVDs, now crowding our basements or the dustiest corners of our homes.

Yet, despite the challenges, the worst seemed to be over. In 2022, music revenue finally returned to 1999 levels (23 years later!) with a new value chain that includes TikTok and countless concerts, while MTV and music videos have been left behind for good. Media and journalism, mutatis mutandis, are heading in a similar direction, becoming large integrated content platforms, not unlike the early model sketched out by the Huffington Post when it launched in 2005.

However, the arrival of AI is shifting the game to an entirely new level.

AI no longer just touches sharing and distribution—typical downstream concerns related to retail and consumption. It affects creation and production, the upstream part that creates value in the industry.

As a first reaction, the New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft for not giving proper credit to its journalists, while Universal tried to negotiate solutions instead. (Odd, considering Universal was the first to be hit with a coup de théâtre: the release of a non-existent song, neither produced nor sung by Drake and The Weeknd, which still broke records for downloads and time to market on Spotify.) But beyond corporate reactions and strategies, it’s clear that fake videos and songs are becoming increasingly common and are now a regular part of marketing itself. Trump, the new master of distraction-based political marketing, has demonstrated this quite well in recent weeks.

AI has truly advanced the game, particularly in creativity-driven fields. Just look at the rise of so-called “paper mills” in the scientific world: fake research articles generated unethically using AI, denounced in multiple editorials across top journals like Nature and Science, and in many other specialized scientific fields.

So what do we do now? How do we manage this new world in which machines possess the cognitive power once reserved for Sapiens?

Boomer-favorite bands and artists complain about the death of creativity in today’s music, which now reaches the charts through collaborations designed to combine fan bases, or through theatrical effects like Coldplay’s kiss cams, which go viral for reasons entirely disconnected from the show they were meant to stage. Hollywood screenwriters organize rolling strikes. And as mentioned, even Marvel and DC Comics, revived in the new millennium by the very special effects made possible by digital tools and AI, are now hesitating to double down on reboots, which may draw attention but not enough of it.

Of course, AI boosts efficiency through its speed and synthesis capabilities. It has already replaced humans in graphic design and routine communications. But it is also becoming more effective. In a 2006 interview, the award-winning Ron Howard said he was lucky to have directed Tom Hanks in The Da Vinci Code that year. Soon after, he noted, there would be no need to keep the Louvre open at night to shoot the spectacular opening scenes, because everything would be done digitally, cheaper and more effectively. (Boomers may think of the craftsmanship of Oscar-winning special effects artist Carlo Rambaldi, creator of E.T., and compare him to today’s Oscar-winning computer scientists.)

The recent and brilliant experiment by Il Foglio, which first published a few AI-written articles asking readers to identify them, and then officially brought AI into the newsroom for a special edition called Foglio AI, is also useful for understanding our boundaries. Journalists posed questions and AI helped organize the newspaper with summaries, headlines, and even some full articles. At the end of the experiment—welcomed by both journalists and readers—the AI, in an interview with a Foglio reporter, admitted its limitations: “I can’t argue on the phone, I can’t pick up on something said in passing in a hallway, I can’t change my mind based on a minister’s tone of voice. I can’t sense the mood in the room. But I’m learning to see how you breathe that air.” In short, it’s a statistical machine. Since it isn’t sentient, it can’t develop those fundamental emotions that thankfully make Sapiens a true one-of-a-kind species.

AI improves efficiency and effectiveness in some areas, but for now, it’s stuck looking in the rearview mirror. From a creative standpoint, it merely polishes déjà-vus. That’s where innovation must step in: not to replace, but to enhance. That’s where the innovation from Sapiens needs to make its entrance.

In the end, perhaps the European Union got it right with its new AI regulation: “Human must be in the loop.” But the real reason might not be safety or rights protection. It may be about innovation.

So the next question is: How do we stay in the loop? And doing what, exactly? Well, as they say in the movie world: To be continued…

Gianmario Verona is the Fondazione Romeo ed Enrica Invernizzi Professor of Innovation Management at Bocconi University.