By Chris Snellgrove
| Published 53 seconds ago
If you didn’t watch the Stranger Things series finale credits, you missed something pretty fun: there were a handful of line drawings of our favorite characters from various past moments. However, the fun factor was severely dampened when fans began alleging that AI was used to create this art, a claim mostly backed up by how weird the characters’ fingers looked in the drawings.
However, in a twist worthy of the show, Stranger Things fans proved that this wasn’t AI art. It was human-drawn art depicting scenes in which the actors just happened to be holding guns in the most weird way possible!
Nancy, Get Your Gun
One of the images that certain Stranger Things fans were convinced was AI was a drawing of Nancy Byers learning how to shoot a handgun from Season 1. The “proof” they brought to the table was that certain physical details seemed off. As one Redditor put it, “right pinky is screwed up…eyes are pointing in two different directions…the bottom of the nose has a fang-shaped extension.” They ended their concise takedown with a troubling verdict: “100% AI.”
Reading these comments and looking at the image, you’d likely be inclined to agree with the criticism. Plus, AI has historically struggled to create realistic-looking hands, and Nancy is holding the gun in the weirdest possible way. For many Stranger Things fans, this was proof enough that, even though the season took nearly half a billion dollars to produce, the showrunners were cheaping out and relying on AI art rather than just hiring a human artist.
Fans Decide To Solve The Mystery
Reacting to these criticisms, some Stranger Things fans decided to track down the images that the art was based on. Their goal was simple: to compare the original image of Nancy (and others) to the drawing that we see during the final episode’s credits. If the drawing really was just AI slop, then it would theoretically be easy to see where the art was horrifically distorting actor Natalie Dyer’s natural features.
However, that’s not what happened…once users began comparing the drawing of Nancy to a screencap of that exact Season 1 scene, they noticed something funny: the art faithfully recreated this moment and didn’t distort anything. Remember, this was the scene where Nancy (who later becomes a gender-swapped Rambo in Season 5) was first learning how to fire a gun, so the actor is making an intentional choice to hold the firearm in a weird way. The art didn’t prove AI screwed up the actor’s fingers; rather, it proves that a real human artist did a bang-up job recreating exactly how the character looked at this exact moment.
These AI Rumors Are Now Terminated
The same thing can be said for a drawing of Linda Hamilton’s Dr. Kay that some Stranger Things fans thought was AI. Her character was similarly weirdly holding a handgun (though not quite as weird as Nancy), and some thought the drawing was yet another example of generative AI distorting fingers. Once again, a comparison of the drawing to the actual scene confirmed that this was a faithful recreation of Hamilton’s exact pose rather than an egregious example of AI slop.
If it were proven that the Stranger Things series finale used AI, it would have been bad news for Netflix. The show’s final episode has already proven to be very divisive, and the Duffer Brothers (bless them) keep making things worse every time they give an interview. Fortunately for these creators and their chosen streaming platform, fans took a page out of Mike and Eleven’s book and banded together to disprove claims that they relied on AI rather than paying a human artist. For their next trick, maybe those fans can do the impossible: convince me the series finale didn’t suck a fat one!
