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Join today<\/a><\/p>\n \n Already a member? Tell me, Muse, of the adventures of a man. A man of resources, driven time and again off course, having plundered the sacred town of Troy. Or if you can\u2019t be bothered, O Muse, just pull up the link to Elon Musk<\/a>\u2019s Wikipedia page and call it close enough.<\/p>\n It\u2019s been some months now since Musk, memelord Odysseus of Big Tech Ithaca, first set his sights on The Odyssey, Homer\u2019s classic epic of hubris and consequence. Musk \u2013 the much-despised CEO of Tesla and SpaceX \u2013 was one of the loudest critics of the \u201chistorical inaccuracies\u201d in Christopher Nolan\u2019s film adaptation<\/a>. (These largely boiled down to the inclusion of non-white actors among its dozens-strong cast, and, in Elliot Page, the casting of a trans man playing the Greek soldier Sinon.) Nolan was, said Musk at the time, an \u201canti-white racist\u201d. A wider right-wing boycott ultimately proved about as effective as a Trojan horse made entirely of glass: The Odyssey opened to rave reviews, and has earned $1.794bn, making it the 11th biggest film of all time. Still, Nolan\u2019s Odyssey faced another threat: a rival Odyssey adaptation, proposed by Musk and developed entirely using AI. This one, claimed Musk, would be \u201chistorically accurate and true to the art of Homer\u201d.<\/p>\n To the surprise of no one, such a movie has not materialised. Instead, on Friday, Musk\u2019s AI platform Grok Imagine shared a seven-minute-long video of pure AI slop, billed as the first \u201cepisode\u201d of the Odyssey adaptation. It is crappy and repellent, and abjectly unconvincing in the way that AI\u2019s attempts to mimic traditional moviemaking always are. (Amusingly, it seems to have ripped some of its aesthetics straight from the Nolan film, with the oh-so-scandalously anachronistic horsehair-crested helmets making an appearance.) The video is a waste of time, money and attention, and people have inevitably seen right through it<\/a>.<\/p>\n If anything, the risible Odyssey \u201cepisode\u201d serves as heartening proof that AI is nowhere near ready to replace traditional filmmaking. What it\u2019s producing is fundamentally unreleasable in any commercial format; there is nothing of value in it. AI is an active danger to the film industry; don\u2019t get me wrong \u2013 its integration is already eroding job opportunities for skilled craftspeople, artists, designers, crewmembers, writers, background actors and stunt performers, and this is a problem that will only get worse. But the notion that people will accept these wholly alien facsimiles of cinema is nonsense. It does beg the question, however: does Musk actually think the AI Odyssey is any good?<\/p>\n There are, essentially, two possibilities. The first, that Musk can see his AI Odyssey for the crud that it is, and is simply promoting the film in an effort to further the financial interests of his AI company, Grok. The second possibility is somehow even more damning \u2013 that Musk is bereft of basic artistic comprehension, and genuinely believes that the cinematic abomination he commissioned has any kind of artistic worth. Whichever way you slice it, it\u2019s a bad look.<\/p>\n A year ago, octogenarian novelist Joyce Carol Oates wrote a memorably eviscerating assessment of Musk. She noted how \u201ccurious\u201d it was that \u201csuch a wealthy man never posts anything that indicates that he enjoys or is even aware of what virtually everyone appreciates […] In fact, he seems totally uneducated, uncultured. The poorest persons on Twitter may have access to more beauty and meaning in life than the \u2018most wealthy person in the world\u2019.\u201d A nerve having perhaps been struck, Musk spent the following day commenting things like \u201cgreat movie!\u201d under tweets about old films. <\/p>\n Oates\u2019 diagnosis seemed to hit the nail on the head. For all Musk\u2019s attempts to insert himself into the world of pop culture \u2013 including egomaniacal guest appearances on The Simpsons and Saturday Night Live \u2013 he has never managed to sell himself as a man of culture. He is not funny, despite a transparent desire to be. <\/p>\n In championing this abysmal AI Odyssey, though, Musk is dragging his reputation to new lows. For his sake, I hope he\u2019s privately as repulsed by Grok\u2019s Odyssey remake as most viewers have been. If not, you have to question Musk\u2019s basic faculties. Is the man once branded as a modern tech \u201cgenius\u201d actually a complete idiot? Are our overlords incapable of the sort of aesthetic savvy that even a child can intuit? I suppose it\u2019s not the end of the world if this is true. We can always ask Grok to generate a new trillionaire, one that\u2019s \u201cintellectually accurate\u201d for a change. I\u2019m sure it\u2019ll be even better than the real thing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Want to bookmark your favourite articles and stories to read or reference later? 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A still from the AI-generated \u2018remake\u2019 of \u2018The Odyssey\u2019 (Grok)<\/p>\n