Caught Stealing director Darren Aronofsky has turned to generative AI for On This Day… 1776, a historical series beamed in directly from hell. Generative AI is “soup not slop”. That’s according to director Darren Aronofsky, referring to his tech company Primordial Soup, which aims to use Google’s AI software to “tell great stories.” The firm’s ... Director Darren Aronofsky goes from Pi to AI with a period drama from the uncanny valley
Caught Stealing director Darren Aronofsky has turned to generative AI for On This Day… 1776, a historical series beamed in directly from hell.
Generative AI is “soup not slop”. That’s according to director Darren Aronofsky, referring to his tech company Primordial Soup, which aims to use Google’s AI software to “tell great stories.”
The firm’s big new project is called On This Day… 1776, which aims to re-create historical moments from the United States’ early history via AI imagery. While the voices you hear in each four-minute vignette are said to be those of real actors, the visuals are all conjured up using AI. And guess what? It looks really weird.
Put out on YouTube by Time magazine, the series aims to provide a “week by week narrative of the most iconic year of America’s founding,” with each brief episode released on or near the day the day its real-world events occurred 250 years earlier.
“This short-form historical series reexamines the American Revolution at a time when the idea of independence was far from inevitable,” one video’s description reads.
At first glance, it doesn’t look too bad – at least until you start to notice the jagged editing, the glassy-eyed quality of the actors, and just how pristine and soulless everything looks. There’s a crisp quality to the lighting that makes everything look like a beer commercial. The series’ makers are also clearly having to work around technical limitations; none of the shots last more than a second or two, and it’s clearly difficult to make a conversation between two AI actors look remotely engaging (check out the whacked-out looking Benjamin Franklin in episode two, January 10: Common Sense).
All of which makes the two episodes released so far feel more like trailers than watchable mini-dramas. And there are so many weird details in each shot that it’s hard to concentrate on the underlying story in any case. Don’t a number of the shots in it look suspiciously like ones in Milos Forman’s classic, Amadeus?
Apparently, there are more of these coming each week over the course of this year.
It’s previously been said that the American Revolution was among the many real-world events George Lucas drew from when he made Star Wars, and that his 1977 film was like a (slightly belated) 200th birthday gift to the USA: a fictionalised story of scruffy rebels standing up to a stuffy, cruel Empire with crisp British accents.
America’s 250th birthday gift to itself? A series of historical re-enactments that contain all the humanity of a Five Nights At Freddys game. Great job, Darren!
