2026 hasn’t been easy for fans of Avatar: The Last Airbender. What started off as a leak of Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender, the first of three animated movies for the franchise, became a bigger web of messiness that’s doesn’t seem to be ending anytime soon.
This weekend’s San Diego Comic-Con featured a panel for the Avatar franchise that included a trailer and release date for the upcoming Avatar: Seven Havens and a look into Avatar Aang‘s production. During the latter portion, the team showed off concept art of the main villain Tagah, with one section focused on his face shape. In a photo taken by an attendee since shared on social media, text in a section on “face shape exploration” begins with, “According to ChatGPT.” Fans online started questioning whether the technology was used in the making of the film, or if it at least played a hand in researching how to design some of its characters.
A swift backlash soon followed against Avatar Aang, but then things got complicated. Some folks online did some digging for further context and learned that not only was the material in question from a presentation slide about Avatar Aang‘s upcoming art book, the person who wrote the book wasn’t involved with the film’s production. Ramin Zahed, who’s previously written art books for Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man and Dog Man, isn’t credited on the film’s production on IMDB, and art books are often outsourced to people uninvolved with a project’s development.
Kat Tsai, a visual development artist who worked on the film, write on Bluesky that there was “absolutely no AI whatsoever in the art / design process!” In a separate post, she said she had “no clue why it was on that slide or who put it there, and every member of the crew I worked with is 100% against AI. Every aspect of the animation is handcrafted by real artists.”
At time of writing, Avatar Studios and Flying Bark have yet to issue a statement on these allegations. io9 has reached out to Abrams Books and the two studios for comment. (We’ll provide an update if we receive a response.) For now, Avatar fans are left conflicted as Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender plays in theaters and on Paramount+, while Avatar: Seven Havens will hit the platform on October 9.
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