{"id":437669,"date":"2026-01-29T22:31:13","date_gmt":"2026-01-29T22:31:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/437669\/"},"modified":"2026-01-29T22:31:13","modified_gmt":"2026-01-29T22:31:13","slug":"an-ai-revolutionary-war-series-darren-aronofsky-and-google-say-yes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/437669\/","title":{"rendered":"An AI Revolutionary War Series? Darren Aronofsky and Google Say Yes"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tBenjamin Franklin and The Battle of Brooklyn \u2014 in AI<\/a>?<\/p>\n

\n\tThat\u2019s the premise of an intriguing, provocative\u00a0new series that Darren Aronofsky<\/a> is producing via his AI-focused venture Primordial Soup. Drawing on the tech of Google<\/a> DeepMind, with which the company has a deal, Primordial Soup is dramatizing the scenes from some of the Revolutionary War period\u2019s most pivotal moments and releasing them on Time<\/a>\u2019s YouTube channel.<\/p>\n

\n\tTitled On This Day\u2026 1776, the short-form series will see each episode focus on a different key moment from that crucial year. The fact-based narratives will rely on SAG voice actors and AI visuals \u2014\u00a0 a\u00a0\u201ccombination of traditional filmmaking tools and\u00a0emerging AI capabilities,\u201d the companies said in a statement. The hook? Each episode will drop on the 250th anniversary of its occurrence.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe debut episode<\/a> centers on George Washington\u2019s raising of the Continental Union Flag in Somerville, Mass., to boost the colonists\u2019 morale; the second installment<\/a> has Benjamin Franklin prodding a newly arrived Thomas Paine to give voice to common sense, leading to a pamphlet that was in a way the country\u2019s first viral TikTok, changing broad sentiment in the colonies. Both episodes drop Thursday. Others will come every week throughout this sestercentennial year.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tThomas Paine in the AI-generated series On This Day\u2026 1776.<\/p>\n

\n\tAronofsky is executive producing with his longtime writing partners Ari Handel and Lucas Sussman, the latter of whom is overseeing a team of writers, with a host of editors, artists, directors and designers also working on the project. Their goal is \u201creframing the Revolution not as a foregone conclusion but as a fragile experiment shaped by those who fought for it,\u201d according to a statement from the companies. A trailer shows a number of historical figures attempting to rouse colonists as they slowly begin gaining confidence.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn focusing on the Colonial period, Aronofsky is drawing on an era that has often come to to define entertainment mediums: 1776 and Hamilton for the Broadway musical; John Adams and Turn for cable television. Now add AI viral-video content to that pile.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe Time connection to the DeepMind series adds another layer of intrigue, pairing America\u2019s ultimate 20th-century documentarians of history with its quintessential 21st-century fabricator of technology. Salesforce is also backing the project, and its subsidiary Slack was integral to the production, principals said.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn a way the use of AI to reconstruct lavish historical scenes is a devilishly simple use case: rather than try to lean in to LLM\u2019s surrealist abstractions to tell science-fiction and other genre stories, Aronofsky is deploying it for a bread-and-butter example of traditional cinema: the historical drama, allowing it to take the place of expensive and often prohibitive physical production.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe mother! director\u2019s involvement in the Internet-based project ups the pedigree of online AI video creations, which until now has often involved embattled ads from major brands<\/a> and promising but raw genre stories from upstart\u00a0creators<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\n\tAronofsky has been vocal about wanting to use AI for the kind of kinetic storytelling he is known for in his films \u2014\u00a0 \u201csoup not slop,\u201d he has said. Google DeepMind has pacted with him to see what an artist of his caliber could do with it. An earlier project from the partnership, Eliza McNitt\u2019s\u00a0Ancestra, premiered at Tribeca last year.<\/p>\n

\n\tBen Bitonti, president of distribution partner Time Studios, noted in a statement that, \u201cThis project is a glimpse at what thoughtful, creative, artist-led use of AI can look like \u2014 not replacing craft, but expanding what\u2019s possible and allowing storytellers to go places they simply couldn\u2019t before.\u201d \u00a0Of course, physical production already allows storytellers to do this, but AI advocates point out that given the time and budget burdens so many of these period productions would never have gotten made in the first place.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe episodes could also help answer a compelling question: could an AI model trained on a wide raft of historical materials capture the essence of a time and its personalities better than an individual flesh-and-blood reconstruction?<\/p>\n

\n\tThe use of AI in high-end storytelling accompanies another growing trend: the deployment of video tools for everyday people, as demonstrated by Disney\u2019s recent deal with <\/a>OpenAI that makes Sora available on Disney Plus. In so doing, Aronofsky is seeking to walk an AI line between Disney, which wants everyone to use <\/a>it, and filmmakers like Guillermo del Toro, who doesn\u2019t even think<\/a> high-end filmmakers\u00a0should.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Benjamin Franklin and The Battle of Brooklyn \u2014 in AI? That\u2019s the premise of an intriguing, provocative\u00a0new series…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":437670,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[182,181,507,21826,168,74,2384],"class_list":{"0":"post-437669","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-darren-aronofsky","12":"tag-google","13":"tag-technology","14":"tag-time"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/437669","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=437669"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/437669\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/437670"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=437669"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=437669"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=437669"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}