Darren Aronofsky was a director who made interesting, if sometimes polarizing, films like Black Swan, Mother!, NoahAnd The wrestler. But it’s a safe bet that people won’t need to debate the relevance of Aronofsky’s new project. Because anyone with eyes can see that this looks like low-effort AI slop. To put it another way, this sounds like absolute crap.
Aronofsky is producing a new short-form series with his AI production company Primordial Soup called “On This Day…1776,” according to the Hollywood journalist. The series uses Google DeepMind technology to create short videos about the Revolutionary War, posted on Time magazine’s YouTube channel. In 2018, Marc Benioff, founder of Salesforce bought timeand the cloud software giant is sponsoring this monstrosity of a series.
The series uses human voice actors who belong to the Screen Actors Guild (SAG), which is clearly an attempt to alleviate the inevitable backlash from inside and outside Hollywood. Those in the film and television industry have fiercely opposed the use of AI to replace the talented artists and actors who create the media we watch. This concern obviously comes from personal interest, because no one wants to be ousted from their job. But they also care about the quality of the work done. And there has also been a revolt among the average consumer, people who have been inundated with the lowest quality AI garbage imaginable. It’s really everywhere now.
The first episode, titled “The flag“, is three and a half minutes long and attempts to tell the story of George Washington raising the Continental Union flag in Somerville, Massachusetts. It doesn’t offer anything compelling in terms of storytelling. It’s the kind of thing you’d skip over as a cutscene in a particularly bad video game.
Everything has a dead, creepy quality to it, as the actors’ audio is poorly synced with the lips of the AI concoctions.
Have you ever seen a 1960s spaghetti western where the audio just doesn’t seem to match, even though it was clearly filmed with English speaking actors and the “dubbing” is in English? This happened because audio was added in post-production, as direct sound recording was expensive in Italy during the post-war period. You get the same effect here, even though there’s no good reason. Well, no good reason aside from probably saving a ton of money on hiring human actors.
The second episode, titled “Common sense“, attempts to tell the story of Thomas Paine by writing Common sense. Benjamin Franklin makes an appearance, but it proves that this series’ most recognizable founding fathers are the strangest to watch.
The episode jumps around inconsistently, much like the first episode, without anchoring the viewer in anything that should interest us. It’s really a nasty waste. And if you bother to pause scenes, you can spot the kind of telltale anomalies that plague other AI-generated video projects, like strangely distorted hands in background characters. Hands always give that thing away.
Then there are the words that appear on the screen in the trailerlike the pamphlet that is supposed to include the word “America” but instead reads something closer to “Λamereedd”.
The series is specially designed for this centennial of America’s founding, and each episode would air on the 250th anniversary of the day it happened, according to the Hollywood Reporter. And it’s certainly a fun concept if the final product was worth watching. But that’s not the case. This is rubbish. The people who make it and distribute it obviously don’t think so.
“This project is a glimpse into what thoughtful, creative, artist-led use of AI can look like — not to replace craft, but to expand what’s possible and allow storytellers to go places they simply couldn’t go before,” Ben Bitonti, president of Time Studios, told The Hollywood Reporter.
The reaction on social media was not as kind. “I know my expectations were low, but damn, Darren Aronofsky producing AI slop was not on my bingo card.», a user wrote. On Bluesky, another joked“Previously, when Darren Aronofsky wanted to feature a dead-eyed actor, he would simply employ Jared Leto.”
And other users sorted out all the anomalies, with one Bluesky reviewer writing: “I love Aronofsky’s new scene where the colonist takes off his hat to clap, revealing that underneath there was a second, larger hat.” »
“Nothing represents the end of America after 250 years like using artificial intelligence to depict the creation of the Declaration of Independence,” another user said. joked.
The videos have been available on Time’s YouTube channel for over 7 hours as of this writing, but they aren’t getting much attention in their original format. The first episode only has 5,000 views. The second episode has just over 2,000. Social media posts ridiculing the production seem to fare better, simply because people don’t care. A video on Bluesky is completed 2,500 quote postsalmost all of them apparently making jokes about the horror of the situation.
Gizmodo reached out to Ken Burns for comment, but did not immediately receive a response.
