Director Of Marathon’s Incredible Cinematic Short Can’t Believe Some People Are Calling It AI Slop

Whatever your feelings about Bungie, the state of Destiny 2, or the promise of Marathon, the cinematic short created to reveal the studio’s upcoming extraction shooter earlier this year was one of the coolest introductions to a video game world I’ve ever seen. It also looked like the complete antithesis of cheaply and amorphously generated slop. So I did not expect to see its director, Alberto Mielgo, recently try to defend it against accusations of being made with AI.

“I can’t believe we’ve reached a point where I have to clarify this, but here it goes: this is not AI,” the Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse art director wrote on Instagram on November 17. “HELLO. Everything you see in this film: paintings, animations, 2D and 3D work, compositing, and renders done with huge team — 155 incredible people and hell of hours, days, months…Yes, our Achilles’ heel: time.”

The cinematic short combines CGI, live-action footage, and Marathon’s broader design language to evoke a super tight sci-fi short story about mercenary runners pillaging an alien planet who slowly lose themselves, their memories, and their humanity as they are cloned over and over again to serve their mega corp sponsors. It prompted some fans to dream of a version of Marathon that married that world building to a completely single-player, story-driven campaign.

“I truly love this little film,” Mielgo wrote on Instagram. “Many of you ask me what my opinion on AI is… Honestly, I have no idea. But one thing is certain: AI will never take away my (your) urge or joy for making art and painting. That part will never be replaced. (This text was kindly edited with ChatGPT).”

It’s not entirely clear where the allegations of the short being made with AI first sprang from. Were they serious critiques or simply online passersby assuming that it could only look so good and otherworldly with the help of AI, because increasingly that’s what the rest of the internet’s algorithms are teaching them.

Mielgo also weighed in on Marathon‘s brief plagiarism controversy earlier this year in which graphics lifted from another artist online made it into marketing footage and playable builds of the game. Bungie apologized and promised a thorough review of what went wrong in its pipeline, but it left some wondering where the theft ended and Marathon‘s exciting aesthetic began. Though it was also clear at the time that part of the backlash was simply bad-faith critics looking for something else to pile on Bungie about.

The Marathon plagiarism controversy was ‘blown out of proportion’

“But you know what I hate the most?” Mielgo wrote in what now appear to be deleted comments, according to The Game Post. “Working our asses off for years to create something cool, only for it to get eclipsed by sphincter smelly press and headline readers.”

He continued, hitting back at people who didn’t believe him in the comments, “It was genuinely a mistake, blown out of proportion by people like you and hungry sphincter press. Regardless, to your pseudowistle, none of the text/fonts ever reached our team. The Bungie team is fantastic, and the work they did before us was f****ng outstanding. I loved working with them.”

Marathon was supposed to already be out but got delayed following negative feedback during an alpha test earlier this year. The team’s been making lots of changes to the game in the interim, including the highly requested addition of proximity chat. Sony says the game will release before April 2026. Hopefully, people take whatever gets released on its own terms rather than letting it be overshadowed by all of the other baggage swirling around its development.