I’m not convinced that Stuart Fails to Save the Universe titles are ‘AI slop’ — in fact HBO Max creators have teased that there really is a hidden message in the changes jasmine.valentine@futurenet.com (Jasmine Valentine) | usagoldmines.com

Mild spoilers for Stuart Fails to Save the Universe episode 2 ahead.

Even with episode 2 of The Big Bang Theory spinoff bringing back Penny (Kaley Cuoco) and film and TV’s Christine Baranski in cameo roles, Stuart Fails to Save the Universe has had a rough week of press.

With the title card for the new HBO Max show uploaded to X/Twitter last week, fans wasted no time branding the cartoonish explosion as “AI slop.”

“Has everyone just forgotten things are supposed to be pleasant to look at?” one fan replied, with a second adding, “Crazy to build the entire intro around saying ‘Don’t skip! Appreciate the work we put into this!’ when it’s so clearly AI slop.”

As of writing, there has currently been no comment on whether AI was used to help make the title sequence, but now that episode 2 has been released, they will change with each episode.

Regardless, I can’t help wondering if the AI-look (real or not) is distracting us from what’s really going on in the titles: the fact that there will be a hidden message somewhere along the way.

‘The point of the titles was to entertain’

“Yeah, there was,” Chuck Lorre tells me when I tell him that I’ve been psyching myself out over a potential hidden message in the changing Stuart Fails to Save the Universe titles.

“The point of the titles was to entertain and cause more laughter… not to dazzle anyone with our extraordinary ability to do special effects. They had to be worth viewing.”

“The only way to not skip the titles was to make each title have a different comic premise. Danny Elfman even went ahead and changed the theme song every week.”

“It’s great that you had that reaction… that’s what we want,” Zak Penn adds.

Does Lorre’s remark mean that AI definitely wasn’t used? It’s difficult to say. But the title card script is slowly gaslighting us into believing we’re missing something — and without giving too much away, that’s going to become more obvious as the weeks go by.

Is there more than meets the eye to the titles that even I haven’t spotted? The answer is probably yes. But only Lorre, Penn and Bill Prady know for definite, and I’m not entirely sure if their responses were simply trying to catch me out again.