Darren Aronofsky, Your AI Bullshit Destroys American History in “On This Day…1776”

Just over two minutes into the first episode of the new short film series, “On This Day… 1776,” we see a hand tenderly running over the title page of Thomas Paine’s controversial pamphlet Common Sense; Addressed to the population of America.

Only, at that moment, the word “America” ​​disappears, replaced by the nonsense, all-caps text “Aamereedd”.

It’s a classic story that we’re in the presence of Generative artificial intelligence.

But this is not the moment you might think. The filmmakers behind the series, led by executive producer Darren Aronofsky, are fully embracing this Obstetric video. This is a big driving force behind On This Day…1776, as is the desire to tell the stories of the American Revolution on its 250th anniversary.

Aronofsky is best known for directing high-profile films, including Black Swan, The Whale, and Mother, but he is also the founder of Primal soupthe first AI studio created “On This Day…1776”. Its greatest ambition, according to its website, is to merge art and technology into a new creative paradigm, “integrating bold narrative, emotional depth and experimental workflows.” That is, the studio wants to use artificial intelligence to create real art.

Good luck with that.

Because of Darren? You’re all making a mess of this project.

I’ve been watching the episodes as is Drop on YouTubeAnd I’m in amazement. A bold novel? It’s like performance theatre, which turns into self-parody. Emotional depth? Almost as much as you’d find on the cover of your average history textbook.

It’s a hellish stew of machine-driven AI and bad human choices.

At least they’re aware of the whole “test workflows” thing. Creatives in Hollywood and beyond are staring at artificial intelligence systems that threaten to take away their livelihoods and devalue the skills they’ve worked their entire lives to master. Aronofsky and Primordial Soup say they’re trying to find a way forward in blending human talent and power with AI tools that have determinism written all over them.

We’re living in an anxiety-ridden moment caused by powerful photo and video tools like Google’s Show and Nano banana And OpenAI Soraalong with the introduction of an artificial intelligence being named Tilly Norwood. After two years of strikes in Hollywood Use of artificial intelligence In films and television shows, Walt Disney Studios in late December reached a level Working with OpenAI Allowing AI to devour characters from Marvel, Pixar and Star Wars.

In an interview with The Guardian Last summer, shortly after Primordial Soup launched, Aronofsky acknowledged that AI tools were being widely used to create random acts, citing that as a motivation. “There are a lot of artists who fight artificial intelligence, but I don’t see that it makes any sense,” he said. “If we don’t shape these tools, someone else will.”

But the way to combat the decline of AI — gorgeous but soulless images and videos, superficially clear text lacking any real understanding of the real world, all flooding the Internet — is not more AI decline.

And I’m sorry, this is what we have on this day…1776.

What artificial intelligence did in “On This Day…1776”

The On This Day…1776 episodes aim to recreate iconic moments from that founding year, appearing weekly for the first time in the history of the moment being depicted. It’s less than 5 minutes long, so on that basis alone, don’t expect Ken Burns’ American Revolution.

So far, those moments include challenging George Washington Raising the American flag and Spread common sense for Paine. On the plus side, there’s a crispness to the pacing (perhaps a result of the time limits of AI video generation), a richness of detail and a sense that the filmmakers are trying to give us a “you’re there” feeling.

But the overall effect falls somewhere between unsettling and funny. The flag episode has the heavy feel of a recruitment advertisement for the Continental Army, rather than any kind of meaningful narrative. The drawing room encounter between Paine and Ben Franklin would be right at home with the interactions fabricated in a corporate HR training video.

There are strange directorial and editorial choices across the episodes. Tight shots of twisted shoes and the back of people’s heads. Passing action from hand to hand in quick cut scenes. Ridiculous titling sequences featuring popular characters. An 8-second sequence in the science episode shows us close-ups of one mouth after another screaming. Presumably, these filmmaking decisions were made by humans.

Then there is artificial intelligence. Faces are waxy or rubbery, and often have a strange combination of blurring and excessive texture. At one point we see a very wet hand; It’s supposed to indicate feverish sweating but instead it looks like an alien creature emerging from a pod. They rarely lip sync with the words they speak. The faces, especially Franklin’s, change subtly but unsettlingly.

The AI ​​has a particularly difficult time with the members of Parliament gathered to listen to George III speak about the rebellious colonies. There is a resemblance to the dozens of middle-aged men in wigs crammed into the seats, not least in the smaller group shots of the men who are clearly clones of each other.

More than almost anything else, what undermines the series is its exhibitionistic nature. We are repeatedly exposed to intense close-ups: strands of hair, the weave of a burlap sack, the wooden texture of a match or a ship’s mast, the sharp, painful wrinkles on the faces of old men. Okay, okay, we get it – AI visuals are getting a lot better in realism.

What we can’t get enough of from Primordial Soup is how accurately it uses AI. the press release The release announcement for On This Day… 1776, which describes it as an “animated series,” vaguely refers to “a combination of traditional filmmaking tools and emerging AI capabilities” and to the series being “animated by artists using a variety of generative AI tools.” He also notes that the series was produced “in part” using AI from Google’s DeepMind division, and that DeepMind brought us Gemini and Nano Banana as well.

The Primordial Soup website doesn’t say anything specifically about “On This Day… 1776”, and in fact it doesn’t say much at all. But it has an “opportunity” page indicating that it is I’m looking for AI artists Who want to “contribute to new cinematic rules built in real-time” by working with AI tools such as Veo, Runway, Midjourney and Sora with 3D/VFX software including Blender, Unreal and Houdini.

Veo was instrumental in Made by ancestorsthe first of three planned short films from the DeepMind and Primordial Soup partnership that aims to explores New apps for Veo. Grandparentswhich debuted at the Tribeca Film Festival last June, combines generative video with live-action filmmaking.

So it is certain that Veo is responsible for much of what we see in “On This Day…” 1776.

Meanwhile, what about the humans involved in making the series? Again, there is very little to go on. The episodes don’t have any artist credits, nor are they listed anywhere else I’ve looked. Press materials say the series is “voiced by SAG actors,” but again, there are no individual credits. There is an indication that the score was written by someone named Jordan Dijkstra and to a writers room led by Lukas Sussman. So these are two humans, at least.

Representatives for Primordial Soup and Time Studios, the series’ distributor, did not respond to a request for further details.

The place of artificial intelligence in history

So how can On This Day…1776 serve as a guidebook for that time in American history? For now, two episodes in, the AI ​​and tics of the filmmakers are little more than a distraction. As a costume drama, it looks good on menstrual dates like clothes, household items and the like. The exterior of the Longfellow House in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Washington was headquartered that winter, was remarkably on point—I used to walk by the real house almost every day, and recognized it immediately.

I was pleased to see the second episode’s focus on common sense, a provocative exhortation to American colonists to oppose the tyranny that had so much influence at the time and which doesn’t always get the attention it deserves today.

Fifty years ago, when the country was celebrating its bicentennial, CBS ran a series of “Bicentennial Minutes” that aired nightly during prime time. A famous actor, politician, or other celebrity would talk directly to the camera, the graphics were low-key, and we learned a little about Boston Tree of freedomCongress is discussing Articles of Confederation Or a small incident An island in New York Harbor.

They were more humble reflections than what we got from the primal soup. I was in high school at the time and watching TV, and I remember enjoying those minutes, even though they were minor. (Hey, I became a history major in college.)

The press materials for On This Day… 1776 suggest that its re-creation “recasts the Revolution not as an inevitable outcome but as a fragile experiment shaped by those who fought for it.”

It’s an excellent point. The success of the American Revolution was not guaranteed, and efforts to create something new and worthwhile were often compromised.

We are now at a similar stage, experiencing the real experience of integrating AI into the human enterprise in a healthy and viable way. Whether we succeed or not, history will decide.

I have to point out that in the Common Sense episode, “Aamereedd” only appears for a split second. And in all the other views of the booklet cover—I counted at least twenty—the name of the new land appeared clear as day and spelled correctly: America.