Elon Musk promised to use artificial intelligence to create an anti-woke version of “The Odyssey” that’d be better than Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster and “historically accurate and true to the art of Homer.”
Well, it seems he half succeeded.
On Oct. 27, the tech titan posted the first seven minutes of the AI-generated project on his X account, giving viewers a peek at his interpretation created in collaboration with director Dev Walker, London-based AI company Wonder Studios and Grok Imagine, an AI visual content generator developed by Musk’s xAI.
True to his earlier complaints accusing Nolan of casting Black actors in key roles simply because he “wants the awards,” there were no people of color. But the footage, which Musk bills as “Episode 1 of our Odyssey series,” takes considerable liberties with Homer’s epic poem that end up making the film look like a cookie-cutter sword-and-sandal epic made for 1990s cable television.
In its one star (out of five) review, The Guardian accurately calls the AI footage “ponderous and inert, demonstrating its familiar uncanny-valley stock-footage quality with classical-age ‘Call of Duty’ graphics.”
The Telegraph took a much harsher view. In typical British tabloid-styled hyperbole, the London publication’s critic called the footage “so unsettling you can feel your eyeballs twitch at its sloppy gruesomeness … the glassy-eyed characters, with their expressionless voices, give the episode a zombie-like quality.”
If only it were that wretched, maybe it would be watchable in a train-wreck sort of way.
But the truth is, the Musk’s “The Odyssey” looks good, albeit bland.
The clip features massive fleets of ships, battles at sea and on horseback. Visually, AI is terrific at simulating archetypes – the grizzled beards, British accents and epic sweep copied from what has come before. The trouble is that the characters feel curiously lifeless and personality-free, a stark contrast to Nolan’s distinctive, human vision as personified by Matt Damon’s Odysseus.
The tone also falls short.
“There was once a king whose coming knew no equal,” ominously intones a female narrator as the clip begins. “But an old oath bound him to a distant war. To escape it, he played a madman.”
Compare that to the opening of Homer’s epic poem, as translated by Emily Wilson:
“Tell me about a complicated man.
Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost
When he had wrecked the holy town of Troy.”
Notably, Musk, who has often suggested that we all live in a simulation (filmmaker Alex Gibney acknowledged that by constructing an AI-generated Musk avatar in his four-hour documentary “Musk”) did not reference his beef with Nolan in posting the footage. He seemed proud of the technology rather than the story, inviting viewers to “Let us know in the comments if you’d like a full breakdown of how it was done!”
No word on when future episodes might be released.
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This article originally published at Elon Musk reveals AI ‘Odyssey’ to rival Christopher Nolan. Is it any good?.