Paramount Just Used AI To Ruin Star Trek's Best Character

By Chris Snellgrove
| Published 12 seconds ago

As a franchise set in the far future, you might expect Star Trek to make some definitive, sweeping statements about the use of AI. However, various shows and movies have presented this technology as something of a double-edged sword. In Star Trek, AI powers the ship’s computers and holodecks, and it helps bring the beloved android officer Data to life. But AI is also responsible for numerous existential threats to the entire galaxy, including everything from evil androids like Lore to weapons of mass destruction like the Planet Killer and Control. Star Trek is ultimately very wishy-washy about this technology, presenting it as both a game-changer and a life-taker.

In the real world, the good of AI is quite outweighed by the bad. Sure, it can help you write emails and generate images, but it’s also being used by massive corporations to cut corners and give paying customers cheap slop, all so some rich exec doesn’t have to pay some poor, overworked creative.  Now, Star Trek has officially become part of the problem. Recently, Paramount seemingly used AI to create a thumbnail of William Shatner for Paramount+, and it created the stupidest-looking image in Trek history. Unfortunately, this is now the inevitable future of the franchise: a studio phoning in even the most basic creative efforts, all to please a fandom that is quietly dying.

Meet AI Slop Captain Kirk

This story begins with the worst streaming service ever created: Paramount+. Like all streamers, this platform provides thumbnails for various movies. Normally, this is just a still from the film. For example, when you scroll down to Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, you might see an image of James Doohan giving his best thousand-yard stare. If you scroll to Star Trek III: The Search For Spock, you might see that melty-faced weirdo that Dr. McCoy tries to hitch a ride with. However, when fans recently scrolled to Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, they saw an insanely ugly image of William Shatner that was seemingly created by AI.

The image features Shatner staring into the camera with a relatively sedate look on his face. He is wearing a suit and tie, which is properly absurd. Not only does Admiral Kirk never wear this suit in The Wrath of Khan, but the only time he wore anything remotely like this was when he donned a pinstripe gangster suit in the Original Series cheesefest episode “A Piece of the Action.” The most notable thing about this thumbnail on Paramount + is that one of Shatner’s eyes has a weird red glow around it. The whole thing is surreal and looks like what would happen if the Borg decided to assimilate Don Draper.

Garbage In, Garbage Out

So, what the heck happened here? On Bluesky, Ryan Estrada seemingly cracked the case. The image of Shatner’s face mostly does come from The Wrath of Khan. It’s from the scene where Kirk completes a retinal scan before accessing classified information on Project Genesis. In the movie, this is an extreme close-up of Kirk’s face, one that cuts off his chin and almost everything above his eyes. The shot works well in the movie, but it would look absolutely terrible as a streaming thumbnail. Estrada’s theory (and one I certainly agree with) is that Paramount fed the movie image to a generative AI and asked it to flesh out the rest of his body.

However, the AI took more than a few liberties with Shatner’s character. It basically ruined the actor’s hairline (something previously only God could do), making Kirk look like a slicked-down Wall Street broker. It put him in a business suit for completely unknown reasons, making the image look instantly out of place as a Star Trek thumbnail. Most bizarrely, it didn’t remove the red light from the reticle scan, making Kirk look like he’s got the galaxy’s worst case of red eye (maybe the waste extraction department was slacking). As ugly as it is, though, the worst thing about this AI slop is how damn lazy it is.

AI Slop: The Future Of Star Trek

Star Trek is currently celebrating its 60th anniversary, and Paramount is hoping to revive the entire franchise with a brand new movie. But why would anyone want to watch a film by the same creatively bankrupt people who had to use AI to make a freakin’ thumbnail? These execs are stewards of the coolest sci-fi IP ever created, but they couldn’t be bothered to simply take a suitable screencap from The Wrath of Khan. Sadly, this AI screw-up is an indictment of what Star Trek has become: lazy slop made by lazier creatives who hope you’re too stupid to care about how bad this franchise has become.

They’re wrong, obviously, and Paramount is about to learn a very bitter lesson: the only thing they can’t gin up in AI is fans who actually care about Star Trek anymore!