According to The Hollywood Reporter, Aronofsky is producing a new miniseries titled “On This Day… 1776” with his AI production company Primordial Soup. The series uses Google DeepMind’s technology to create short videos about the Revolutionary War published on Time magazine’s YouTube channel. In 2018, Salesforce founder Marc Benioff purchased Time, and 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), apparently an attempt to mitigate the inevitable backlash from both inside and outside Hollywood. People inside the film and TV industry have fiercely opposed the use of AI to replace the skilled artists and actors who create the media we watch. This concern clearly comes from selfishness because no one wants to be fired from their job. But they also care about the quality of work produced. And there has also been a revolt among the average consumer, people who have been inundated with the lowest-grade 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 the way of narrative. This is the kind of thing you’d find skipped as a cut-scene in a particularly bad video game.
There’s a dead and creepy quality to everything, as the audio of the actors is poorly synced with the AI fabrications.
Have you ever watched a 1960s Spaghetti Western whose audio doesn’t match exactly, even though it was obviously shot with English-speaking actors, and is “dubbed” into English? This occurred because the audio was added in post-production, a result of direct sound recording being expensive in Italy during the post-war era. You get the same effect here, although there’s no good reason for it. Well, there’s no good reason other than saving a ton of money on hiring human actors.
The second episode, titled “Common Sense”, tries to tell the story of Thomas Paine’s writings. common sense. Benjamin Franklin makes an appearance, though, proving that the most recognizable of the Founding Fathers in this series is one of the strangest to look at.
This episode meanders around incoherently like the first episode, without wowing the audience with anything we should care about. It’s a really ugly mess. And if you bother to pause the scenes, you can see the kind of telltale anomalies that plague other AI-generated video projects, like strangely deformed hands in background characters. Hands are always giving this stuff.
Then there are some words that appear on screen in the trailer, such as the pamphlet that should include the word “America” but instead reads something closer to “Λameredd”.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, the series is being created specifically for this centennial of America’s founding, and each episode will reportedly coincide with the 250th anniversary of that day. And it’s certainly a fun concept if the final product is worth seeing. but it’s not like that. trash it. The people who are creating and distributing it clearly don’t think so.
“This project is a glimpse of what thoughtful, creative, artist-led use of AI could look like — not replacing craft, but expanding what’s possible and allowing storytellers to go places they couldn’t go before,” Time Studios president Ben Bitonti told The Hollywood Reporter.
The reaction on social media was not that good. “I know my expectations were low, but Darren Aronofsky’s AI Slope production wasn’t in my bingo card,” wrote one ex-user. “It used to be that when Darren Aronofsky wanted to feature a dead-eyed actor, he’d just hire Jared Leto,” joked another on Bluesky.
And other users are highlighting all the inconsistencies, with one Bluesky critic writing: “Love the new Aronofsky scene where the colonist takes off his hat to cheer, revealing that there was a second and somehow larger hat underneath it.”
Another user quipped, “Nothing represents the end of America after 250 years like using an AI slope to depict the creation of the Declaration of Independence.”
The videos have been available on Time’s YouTube channel for over 7 hours as of this writing, but they aren’t attracting much attention in their original format. The first episode has been viewed just 5,000 times. The second episode count is just over 2,000. Social media posts mocking the production are doing better, simply because people are making fun of them. A video on BlueSky has over 2,500 quotes posted, almost all of which are jokes about how awesome it looks.
Gizmodo contacted Ken Burns for comment, but did not immediately hear back.
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