Darren Aronofsky used to be a director who made interesting, if sometimes polarizing films Black Swan, Mother!, Noahagain The Wrestler. But it seems like a safe bet that people won’t need to debate whether Aronofsky’s new project is any good. Because anyone with eyes can see it looks like low AI slop. To put it another way, it looks like absolute dogshit.
Aronofsky is producing a new short-form series with his AI production company Primordial Soup titled “On This Day … 1776,” according to the Hollywood Reporter. The series uses technology from Google DeepMind to create short videos about the Revolutionary War, published on Time magazine’s YouTube channel. In 2018, Salesforce founder Marc Benioff bought Time, and the cloud software giant is sponsoring this massive series move.
The series uses voice actors from people who are members of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG), which is clearly an attempt to stave off the inevitable backlash from inside and outside of Hollywood. People within the movie and TV industry have strongly opposed the use of AI to replace the talented artists and actors who create the media we watch. That concern obviously comes from a place of self-interest because no one wants to be fired. But they also care about the quality of work being produced. And there has been a revolt among ordinary consumers, people inundated with the worst AI imaginable. It’s all over the place 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 offers nothing compelling in the way of narrative. The kind of thing you’d skip like a cutscene in a really bad video game.
Everything has a dead and eerie quality, as the actors’ voices can’t be perfectly lip-synced to AI concoctions.
Have you ever seen a 1960s Spaghetti Western where the sound doesn’t sound the same, or it was obviously shot with English-speaking actors, and the “dub” is in English? That happened because the sound was added in post-production, which is the result of expensive direct sound recording in Italy during the post-war period. You get the same result here, although for no good reason. Well, there’s no good reason other than it saves a ton of money by hiring human actors.
The second episode, titled “Common Sense,” attempts to tell the story of Thomas Paine’s writing Make sense. Benjamin Franklin makes an appearance, although it proves that the most famous fathers in the series are the strangest to look at.
The episode jumps around vaguely, like the first episode, without focusing the viewer on anything to care about. It’s a really bad mess. And if you bother to set up the scenes, you can see the kind of glitches that plague other AI-generated video projects, like weirdly deformed hands on background characters. Hands always give this thing.
Then there are words that appear on screen in the trailer, such as a banner that should include the word “America” but instead reads something closer to “Λamereedd.”
The series was created specifically for this centennial year of America’s founding, and each episode will reportedly drop on the 250th anniversary of the event, according to The Hollywood Reporter. And that’s a fun idea if the end product was something to behold. But that’s not the case. It’s rubbish. The people who make it and spread it clearly don’t think so.
“This project is a vision of what a thoughtful, creative, artist-led use of AI could look like — not to replace art, but to expand what’s possible and allow storytellers to go places they couldn’t go before,” Ben Bitonti, president of Time Studios, told The Hollywood Reporter.
The reaction on social media has not been so kind. “I know my expectations were low but Darren Aronofsky producing AI slop was not on my bingo card,” wrote one X user. On Bluesky another joked, “It used to be that when Darren Aronofsky wanted to portray a dead actor, he’d just hire Jared Leto.”
And some users have been dissecting everything that goes wrong, one critic of Bluesky writing: “We liked the new scene of Aronofsky when the colonist takes off his hat for fun, revealing that under it was a second and somehow bigger hat.”
“Nothing represents the End of America after a 250 year run like using AI slop to show the creation of the Declaration of Independence,” said one user.
The videos have been up on Time’s YouTube channel for over 7 hours as of the time of this writing, but aren’t getting much attention in their original format. The first episode has just 5,000 views. The second episode has just over 2,000. Social media posts making fun of the product seem to be doing better, simply because people are making fun of it. One video on Bluesky has over 2,500 quotes, almost all of which seem to be joking about how bad it looks.
Gizmodo contacted Ken Burns for comment, but did not immediately hear back.
