Why is everyone freaking out about the posters in ‘True Detective: Night Country’?

Showrunner Issa López weighs in on what viewers believe to be AI-generated posters.

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Jodie Foster in “True Detective: Night Country.”
Credit: Michele K. Short/HBO

Murder mystery shows will always have viewers inspecting the tiniest background details for asnwers, and True Detective: Night Country is no different. Yet in episode 2, certain audience members fixated less on mysterious spirals and gruesome corpsicles, and more on strange looking posters on a character’s wall.

The posters pop up in a scene where trooper Evangeline Navarro (Kali Reis) talks to miner Chuck (Edward Fletcher) about a possible connection to the case of the dead Tsalal scientists.

The walls of his room at the Silver Sky mines are bare apart from two posters: one for the K-Pop group Ive, and the other for a band simply named “Metal.” The latter has an uncanny quality to it as if someone drew a poster for a Kiss tour from memory. Other details, like a date announcing a live performance on the “2st,” made people wonder whether the poster had been made using Artificial Intelligence.

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At a time when the use of AI in film and TV is a hot-button topic, fueling strike demands in 2023 and popping up in the credits of major Marvel TV shows, some viewers expressed disappointment. Others posited that the posters could have been an inside joke from the art department.

True Detective: Night Country showrunner Issa López weighed in on the conversation herself, saying “The story behind that poster is so long, it would require its own season of TD.”

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López clarified that the choice was intentional and linked to the show’s remote setting of Ennis, Alaska. The fictional town is located 150 miles north of the Arctic Circle. With so little to do there, could residents turn to fiddling around with AI?

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The reference to “some kid with AI” could mean that Chuck has a child who made him these posters. López did confirm that the scene originally featured a line about Chuck’s daughter enjoying K-Pop, which would explain the Ive poster.

Speaking to the strangeness of the posters — including the vague “Metal” band and the “2st” date — López allueded to disdain for AI and AI tools like ChatGPT, which rose to prominence during the Night Country shoot.

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Mashable has reached out to HBO for comment on whether the posters were made using AI, or whether it was an artist’s work emulating the style of AI-generated art.

True Detective airs Sunday nights on HBO/Max at 9 p.m ET/PT.

Belen Edwards is an Entertainment Reporter at Mashable. She covers movies and TV with a focus on fantasy and science fiction, adaptations, animation, and more nerdy goodness.

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