– Darren Aronofsky’s AI Revolutionary War Series: Initial Reactions
- Darren Aronofsky used to be a director who made engaging, if sometimes polarizing, films like Black Swan, Mother!, Noah, and The Wrestler.
- 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 human voice actors who belong to the Screen Actors Guild (SAG), which is clearly an attempt to tamp down on the unavoidable backlash from both...
Darren Aronofsky used to be a director who made engaging, if sometimes polarizing, films like Black Swan, Mother!, Noah, and The Wrestler. But it seems like a safe bet that people won’t need to debate whether Aronofsky’s new project is any good. As anyone with eyes can see that it looks like low-effort AI slop. In other terms, 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 tech from google DeepMind to create short videos about the Revolutionary War, published on the youtube channel for Time magazine. In 2018, Salesforce founder Marc Benioff bought 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), which is clearly an attempt to tamp down on the unavoidable backlash from both inside and outside Hollywood. Folks inside the movie and TV industry have fiercely pushed back against the use of AI to replace the skilled artists and actors who create the media we watch. That concern obviously comes from a place of self-interest because nobody wants to be pushed out of a job. But they also care about the quality of the work being produced. And there’s also been a revolt among the average consumer, people who’ve 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 offers nothing compelling in the way of narrative.It’s the kind of thing that you’d skip over as a cut-scene in a particularly bad video game.
Everything has a dead and creepy quality, as the actors’ audio is poorly synced with the lips of the AI concoctions.
Have you ever seen a spaghetti Western from the 1960s where the audio just doesn’t seem to match, even though it was clearly shot with actors speaking English, and the “dub” is in english? That happened 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, though there’s no good reason. Well, no good reason outside of presumably saving a ton of money on hiring human actors.
The second episode, titled “