Marvel's Wolverine AI Accusations Explained: Insomniac Blames a UV Map Bug

Insomniac has denied that Marvel's Wolverine contains any generative AI after a garbled bathroom sign in the PS5 exclusive went viral.

The sign is a texture bug. Insomniac says a fix is coming, and the accusation lasted about a day before the studio shut it down.

The clip came from TikToker SmoothMango, who filmed two bathroom signs where the stick figures melt into each other, and it passed 700,000 views. The X account RockSolid reposted screenshots and asked whether a $300 million game had leaned on AI. That post picked up more than 315,000 views on its own.

Insomniac's director of community and marketing James Stevenson answers those posts directly.

"There are no AI-generated assets in Marvel's Wolverine."

— James Stevenson

He pinned the signs on a UV map bug and said a fix is in the works, which should clear up other glitchy visuals of the same kind. Insomniac has not said when that patch lands.

The explanation holds up under a second look. The sign changes shape depending on the angle and the screenshot, which is what colliding textures do and not what a generated image does. Insomniac has also been building and rebuilding this version of New York since the first Spider-Man, so a bathroom pictogram is the last asset a studio with that library would need to generate.

This lands days after the September 15 launch and on top of a list of smaller fires. Players nicknamed Logan's Scent Trails "fart gas" and complained the blue path pulled them through the world on rails. Insomniac fixed 'Scent Trails' in update v.01.001.005 by cutting the opacity of both that effect and the Audio Sense indicators, and the studio says it is looking at a toggle. Others are picking at the linear story, the quick time events that cannot be failed, and a motorcycle sequence players are testing to see whether Logan can die at all.

The numbers tell a different story than the timeline does. Marvel's Wolverine sold almost 2 million copies in three days, a million of those digital pre-orders, for roughly $130 million. It outsold Death Stranding 2 on PS5 and became the fastest-selling PlayStation Studios release of the year. Leaked documents put Sony's first-year target at 6 million, so a third of that arrived in a weekend, though Alinea Analytics expects the mixed reception to shorten its financial tail well below Spider-Man 2's 18 million.

Critics landed in the middle. IGN gave it a 6, calling the combat satisfying but thin by the end and the character work not quite enough to lift the whole. Metacritic sits at 77, with a 6.5 user score across 3,600 reviews and 32% of them negative. Fans have spent the same week digging up an 'easter egg' to The Last of Us in one of Logan's levels and arguing about a suspected in Mystique's Cerebro scan.

I think Marvel's Wolverine has real problems, and the combat running out of ideas before the credits is the one that matters. What I keep noticing is how little of the noise around it is about that. A game this visible becomes free content for anyone with a camera, and the incentive is to find the worst thirty seconds in it, not the average hour, which is how a texture bug turns into an AI scandal in two days.

The cost of that cycle is not hypothetical. Every wrong AI accusation makes artists prove a negative and makes the real cases easier to wave off. Insomniac had a receipt here. Plenty of smaller studios would not.

Read also: insider Tom Henderson reported that Ubisoft has been testing generative AI in Far Cry for research and development, saying the results look bad so far, and that the publisher is accelerating investment in playable generated AI experiences. Henderson clarified that the testing spans several parts of Ubisoft rather than Far Cry 7 specifically, and that the game, still unannounced, is rumoured to be set in Alaska with a 2027 window.