Darren Aronofsky has always been a divisive filmmaker. But the director of hits like \u201cBlack Swan,\u201d \u201cThe Wrestler,\u201d and \u201cRequiem for a Dream\u201d has now almost certainly blown up his credibility even with his die-hard fans, after cranking out an almost completely AI-generated historical video series.<\/p>\n
Called \u201cOn This Day \u2026 1776,\u201d the show, which consists of several-minute \u201cepisodes,\u201d is meant to cover notable events that took place in the American Revolutionary War, but has instead mostly drawn attention to how awful its AI visuals look<\/a>, on top of its persistent anachronisms. Colonists living in houses with modern vinyl siding? Sure, why not<\/a>.<\/p>\n The reviews, predictably, are brutal. In one titled \u201cRequiem for a film-maker,\u201d The Guardian\u2019s Stuart Heritage blasted<\/a> its faux-photorealism aesthetic as \u201cugly as sin,\u201d and called out its overreliance on center-framed, back-of-the-head shots. \u201cThis is, after all, because the back of an AI-generated head is far less likely to send people into screaming fits of trauma than an AI-generated face,\u201d Heritage wrote.<\/p>\n \u201c\u2018On This Day \u2026 1776\u2019 is genuinely very horrible to watch,\u201d he concluded, \u201cand everybody involved should be ashamed. It is by far the most disturbing thing Aronofsky has made, and I\u2019ve seen the last eight minutes of \u2018Requiem for a Dream.’\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s hard not to agree. The entire show operates in the mode of meaningless montage, because stitching together a collection of barely-related, aesthetically generic shots is the only mode of \u201cfilmmaking\u201d that AI is suited for. The effect is like watching an extended advert. But whereas a commercial usually has the good manners to wrap up in less than a minute, Aronofsky\u2019s monstrosity slogs on with its cavalcade of quick-cutting but slowly-moving close-ups, as if to demonstrate to maximum effect how utterly inane this all looks.<\/p>\n Big names are attached to the series. The show is a collaboration between Aronofsky\u2019s AI studio Primordial Soup, Google\u2019s DeepMind lab, Salesforce, and TIME Studios. This isn\u2019t being sold to us as the work of Aronofsky sitting in his bedroom somewhere and typing in AI prompts. This is supposed to be the high watermark of what AI can bring to the table.<\/p>\n \u201cBut keep watching for more than a few seconds, and it quickly becomes apparent that slop is slop, no matter how it\u2019s gussied up,\u201d wrote Angie Han for The Hollywood Reporter<\/a>. \u201c\u2018On This Day\u2019 positions itself as a well-funded, high-profile, apparently good-faith effort to demonstrate how AI might be deployed as a tool to enhance rather than replace human artistry. Instead, it only goes to show that the problem with AI in filmmaking runs deeper than its technical limitations.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cHow depressing is it\u201d it continues, \u201cthat with the guidance of a visionary filmmaker like Aronofsky, with the lavish financial backing of companies like Google and Salesforce, this thing \u2014 a pair of shoddy, TikTok-length clips that would barely pass muster as animated illustrations for a high-school history lesson, let alone coherent pieces of storytelling in their own right \u2014 was the best anyone could make of the supposedly boundless limitations of AI?\u201d<\/p>\n Aronofsky, by the way, was at one point slated to direct a biopic about Elon Musk<\/a>. Now, it seems like he\u2019s drunk the same AI Kool-Aid that Musk has been pounding.<\/p>\n