Elon Musk follows up on Grok AI’s adaptation of ‘The Odyssey’

Elon Musk is not used to keeping his promises. According to MuskOmeter, a site that tracks what commitments Musk made and whether he kept them, his success rate is about 24%.

So it’s almost impressive that one of his stupidest promises this year actually came true.

On Friday afternoon, Musk shared the first of several planned episodes of an AI-generated version of Homer. The Odysseymade with Grok Imagine, the AI ​​video generator from his company xAI. According to an article from the Grok Imagine account, the project is a collaboration between Wonder Studios and director Dev Walker. Both specialize in making generative AI films.

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Musk first made the promise in July. As Mashable reported at the time, he posted on X that before the end of the year, Grok Imagine would make a feature film Odyssey a film that would be “historically accurate and faithful to the art of Homer”.

It was the culmination of months of Musk complaining about Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey. Much of the right-wing backlash against Nolan’s film has been framed in terms of historical accuracy. The initial trailer sparked a little doubt whether it was a faithful adaptation, as some took issue with the film’s armor, calling it bland and closer to the novel than the Greek.

The biggest scandal came from the casting of Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy and Elliot Page as Sinon. In February, Musk said on X that Nolan had “lost his integrity,” 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.

Leave aside what this says about who can be considered beautiful. Helen of Troy is not a real person. Troy was a real city, but historians still debate whether anything resembling the Trojan War ever happened. In Greek mythology, Helen herself is the daughter of Zeus and was born from an egg. “Historical accuracy” does a lot of work here.

Musk also took issue with Page’s casting. In May, Musk shared posts criticizing the casting, including some that misgendered the trans actor. Because Nolan’s cast list didn’t say who was playing who, online conspiracy theories claimed that Page would play Achilles. Instead, Page played Autre, a character who originally appears in Virgil’s Aeneidwhich is essentially Roman fan fiction about the Trojan War.

Along with casting details, Musk and right-wing influencers predicted that Nolan’s adaptation would fail – “go wake up, go broke.” Instead, The Odyssey opened to $124.5 million in July, a huge number for a nearly three-hour R-rated film. IMAX 70mm 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. He told AFP earlier this year that the idea of ​​replacing human creativity was “nonsense”, according to The Guardian.

Is it Elon Musk The Odyssey GOOD?

Musk’s version of Homer’s tale, imagined by Grok, is what you’d expect. The first episode lasts just over seven minutes and covers the arrival of the Greeks in Troy. Every character is white.

Visually, it has all the usual problems of generative AI video: unnaturally perfect teeth; the weightless, almost water-like texture of the hair; and the skin has a strange, blotchy quality that comes from the model not really understanding lighting or perspective. Backgrounds also suffer from something akin to texture pop-in, where video games load low-resolution textures before detailed textures, so the screen isn’t just black.

Since it’s just a movie to watch, the writing isn’t great and it’s hard to follow all the characters because they look or sound way too much like real people.

Isn’t that Kristofer Hivju?
Credit: Grok Imagine / Wonder Studios / Mashable Screenshot

On top of that, for the entire seven-minute running time, Odysseus is the only named character. Unless you have read The Odyssey fairly recently you’d be confused as to the identities of some of the characters – how are we supposed to know that one of those two men in the photo above is Palamedes? I certainly didn’t.

As part of the promotion, Wonder Studios posted on X that “Homer didn’t have Grok…we have him”. 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 The Odyssey As its theatrical run draws to a close, the critically acclaimed film is set to release digitally on November 17. To help you, the film by Wolfgang Petersen Troy, starring Brad Pitt and Eric Bana, benefited from a cultural reevaluation thanks to the success of Nolan’s film. It is man-made and currently holds an average rating of 3.5 on Letterboxd.