This column is for those creatively minded among you who are worried that the thing that makes you human will soon be obsolete. It’s also for those of us who don’t, perhaps, have their identity forged around their ability to make creative products of any kind, but do understand that consuming these products — art, music, good writing — is in some ways as creative an act, in that it is what helps to make you human.
If you want to feel a little more optimistic, I urge you to spend a quality seven minutes and 12 seconds watching Elon Musk’s entirely AI-generated remake of The Odyssey.
It’s a remake rather than a version, because Musk has touted it as such. It’s his peevish response to what he sees as woke historical inaccuracies in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. These are mainly that the cast isn’t all white, that Elliot Page, a transgender actor, plays the Greek soldier Sinon, and that Lupita Nyong’o takes the role of Helen of Troy.
Musk was touched on his Grok about all this, and promised us that “before this year ends, Grok Imagine will make a full-length movie of The Odyssey that is historically accurate and true to the art of Homer”.
The armed (with an X account) wing of the conservative army had called for a boycott of Nolan’s movie, which was so effective that The Odyssey is now only the 11th-biggest film of all time, earning a scant $1.8bn so far. A Greek tragedy indeed.
When you watch Musk’s film (well, the seven minutes released so far, which feels longer than Odysseus’s 10-year voyage home), the crazy thing is how incredibly AI it all is. The characters break into unconvincing smiles and laughs every now and then, for no apparent reason, reminiscent of the way AI agents unconvincingly try to make you believe that they are actually bonding with you.
If the AI prompt was “make this look as if we could only afford really bad actors, avoid any sort of nuanced portrayals, and make very sure that the dialogue is as ponderous and thudding as the terrible music”, then, yes, this really is a triumph of AI technology.
There’s one extremely short shot (wait, are these shots?) of someone vomiting at sea, and the spewing looks like it’s one of those icky Family Guy vomiting shots that go on forever and ever and are meant to be entirely unrealistic. The vomit looks like the guy is regurgitating a litre or two of piña colada, which (yay for historical accuracy) I believe was actually mentioned in the cruise brochure in The Odyssey. Sample dialogue by the burly lad holding back the vomiter’s hair: “I hope you fight better than you sail.” Sure, buddy, and I hope you fight better than you emote.
Weirdly, as stilted and awful as they are, renderings of the people are more believable than the ones of the invading ships. In one frame, there are nine ships all with identically aligned sails and oars, all miraculously in a dead straight line. It’s the sort of shoddy work that permeates the whole video. This is what happens when you hand over filmmaking to the advertising industry and robots.
Send in the robots
The project is a collaboration between three AI-centric entities. Director Dev Walker, despite having a name that appears to have been generated by AI, appears to be human, even if his work is a slightly better class of AI slop. Then there’s Wonder Studios, a London-based “creative agency and independent studio leveraging AI alongside classic filmmaking expertise to create original content, campaigns, branded content, music videos and films for global brands and artists”. Leveraging, huh? That’s quite the euphemism. The third culprit is Grok Imagine, SpaceXSI’s video generator, which has just come off a run allowing users to produce sexualised deepfakes of photos of real women and schoolgirls posted on X, using handy text prompts like “take off her clothes” or “put her in a bikini”. Historically accurate indeed.
In a way, this piece of garbage is a beautifully actualised metaphor for the way OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Musk and their ilk oversell the benefits of AI. Musk’s actual promise — or threat, depending on how you look at it — was that he would make a historically accurate version of The Odyssey. What we’ve been given is seven minutes of stultifying stereotypes and plodding, robotic (there, I said it) dialogue.
Does Musk actually believe that this is a watchable artefact? If he does, then it’s a morality tale told in accelerated time. This is the sort of disaster of aesthetics we are condemning people to if we insist on sustaining culture on AI slop and tepid hot takes.
