Elon Musk doesn’t have a great track record of keeping his promises. According to MuskOmeter, a site that tracks promises Musk has made and whether he has kept them, he has a success rate of about 24 percent. So it’s almost impressive that one of his silliest promises this year actually came true. On Friday afternoon, Musk shared the first of several planned episodes of an AI-generated version of Homer’s Odyssey, made with Grok Imagine, his company xAI’s AI video generator. According to a post from the Grok Imagine account, the project is a collaboration between Wonder Studios and director Dev Walker. Both specialize in cinema with generative AI. This Tweet is currently unavailable. It may be loading or may have been deleted. Musk first made the promise in July. As Mashable reported at the time, he posted on SEE ALSO: ‘The Odyssey’ Is Exposing Some Unexpected Dating Dealbreakers. That was the culmination of months of Musk complaining about Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey. Much of the right-wing reaction to Nolan’s film was framed in terms of historical accuracy. The initial trailer raised some doubts about a faithful adaptation, as some took issue with the film’s armor, calling it bland and closer to Roman than Greek. The biggest outrage came from the casting of Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy and Elliot Page as Sinon. In February, Musk stated on X that Nolan had “lost his integrity” because of it, as Mashable reported. Musk and others argued that a black woman could not play a character described as the most beautiful woman in the ancient world. Let’s leave aside what that says about who is considered beautiful. Helen of Troy is not a real person. Troy was a real city, but historians still debate whether anything like the Trojan War ever happened. In Greek mythology, Helen herself is the daughter of Zeus and was born from an egg. “Historical accuracy” is doing a lot of the heavy lifting here. Mashable Light Speed Musk also took issue with Page’s casting. In May, Musk again shared posts criticizing the casting, including some that miscast the trans actor. Because Nolan’s casting list did not say who would play who, online conspiracy theories claimed that Page would play Achilles. Instead, Page played Sinon, a character who originally appears in Virgil’s Aeneid, which is essentially Roman fan fiction about the Trojan War. With the casting details, Musk and right-wing influencers predicted that Nolan’s adaptation would flop: “Wake up, screw up.” In contrast, The Odyssey opened with $124.5 million in July, a huge figure for an R-rated film nearly three hours long. The 70mm IMAX screenings sold out weeks in advance, as Mashable previously reported. As of this writing, Nolan’s film has grossed over $1.7 billion worldwide. Nolan, for his part, has been openly skeptical of generative AI. According to The Guardian, he told AFP earlier this year that the idea of replacing human creativity is “nonsense.” Is Elon Musk’s Odyssey good? Musk’s Grok-imagined version of Homer’s tale is pretty much what you’d expect. The first episode lasts just over seven minutes and covers the arrival of the Greeks to Troy. Each character is white. Visually, it has all the usual AI generative video problems: unnaturally perfect teeth; the weightless, almost watery texture of the hair; and the skin has a strange, fuzzy quality that comes from the model not really understanding lighting or perspective. Backgrounds also suffer from something akin to pop-in textures, where video games load low-resolution textures before detailed ones, so the screen isn’t just black. Since it’s just a watchable movie, the writing isn’t that good and it’s hard to keep up with all the characters as they look or feel too much like real people. Isn’t that Kristofer Hivju? Credit: Grok Imagine / Wonder Studios / Screenshot from Mashable On top of that, in the entire seven minutes, Ulysses is the only named character. Unless you’ve read The Odyssey recently, you’d be confused about who some of the characters are: how is one supposed to know that one of those two men in the photo above is Palamedes? Surely not. As part of the promotion, Wonder Studios posted on X that “Homer didn’t have Grok…we did.” It’s true. Homer also told the story well enough that people are still adapting it almost 3,000 years later, without any help from AI. Although Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is coming to an end in theaters, the critically acclaimed film will be released digitally on November 17. To help you out, Wolfgang Petersen’s Troy, starring Brad Pitt and Eric Bana, got a cultural reappraisal thanks to the success of Nolan’s film. It is created by humans and currently has an average rating of 3.5 on Letterboxd. Topics Artificial Intelligence Movie
