Last week, filmmaker Darren Aronofsky’s AI studio Primordial Soup and Time magazine released the first two episodes of On This Day… 1776. The year-long series of short-form videos features short vignettes describing what happened on that day of the American Revolution 250 years ago, but it does so using “a variety of AI tools” to produce photorealistic scenes containing avatars of historical figures like George Washington, Thomas Paine, and Benjamin Franklin.
In announcing the series, Time Studios President Ben Bitonti said the project provides “a glimpse at what thoughtful, creative, artist-led use of AI can look like—not replacing craft but expanding what’s possible and allowing storytellers to go places they simply couldn’t before.”
The trailer for “On This Day… 1776.”
Outside critics were decidedly less excited about the effort. The AV Club took the introductory episodes to task for “repetitive camera movements [and] waxen characters” that make for “an ugly look at American history.” CNET said that this “AI slop is ruining American history,” calling the videos a “hellish broth of machine-driven AI slop and bad human choices.” The Guardian lamented that the “once-lauded director of Black Swan and The Wrestler has drowned himself in AI slop,” calling the series “embarrassing,” “terrible,” and “ugly as sin.” I could go on.
But this kind of initial reaction apparently hasn’t deterred Primordial Soup from its still-evolving efforts. A source close to the production, who requested anonymity to speak frankly about details of the series’ creation, told Ars that the quality of new episodes would improve as the team’s AI tools are refined throughout the year and as the team learns to better use them.
“We’re going into this fully assuming that we have a lot to learn, that this process is gonna evolve, the tools we’re using are gonna evolve,” the source said. “We’re gonna make mistakes. We’re gonna learn a lot… we’re going to get better at it, [and] the technology will change. We’ll see how audiences are reacting to certain things, what works, what doesn’t work. It’s a huge experiment, really.”