I've been harsh about AI on this website before, but I'll give it this—before the advent of the LLM revolution, I don't know that I'd ever seen anything literally without value before (and I watched that Borderlands movie).
Darren Aronofsky, the director behind films like Mother!, Black Swan, and The Whale, has a new project: a dramatic AI recreation of the American Revolution for its 250th anniversary, whose gimmick—aside from being generated by lie machines powered by stolen art—is that each event's retelling airs on the day it happened.
Or, well, that's the gimmick going forward anyway. So far there are two episodes of On This Day… 1776: January 1 and January 10, which actually went live on Time magazine's YouTube channel (where you'll be able to watch the whole lot as they go up, if your only other option is death) on January 29 and January 30.
Produced by Aronofsky's Primordial Soup AI studio, using tech from Google DeepMind, and presented by Salesforce like all great art, the whole thing would be staid and hackneyed propaganda if there weren't a drop of AI on it. With the AI-made actors—their rubbery faces, blank expressions, hair like a swirl of ice cream? It's just wretched top to bottom. Though at least, I suppose, the voices have been provided by real actors.
It's difficult to say which part I hate most. Every scene feels like it was shot by a cameraman determined to look busy, filled with unnecessary swoops and zooms that lend the whole thing a sick-making feeling beyond its general queasy, uncanny valley effect. But it has to keep moving: if it didn't, your brain would start noticing how wrong everything looks. You'd notice AMERICA morphing into AAMERLEDD on the cover of Common Sense, or Ben Franklin's eyes subtly bulging out of his head as he leans forward robotically to chat to Thom Paine in his living room.
Also, Ben Franklin looks like Gollum. Which might be historically accurate, I guess.
Probably the mouths are the worst part. It's something that was a problem back when AI firms were unleashing "AI actress" Tilly Northwood on us last September. The tech just can't quite make people's mouths move right; they grow wide and cavernous, like everyone is mouthing what they're saying to each other through a thick piece of soundproof glass.
So yes, it's terrible, and there's a lot more to come. On This Day... 1776 will air throughout 2026 on the Time magazine YouTube channel. "This is the most unnatural thing I've ever seen in my life," says one satisfied customer in the comments.
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