A truly awful clip of a prospective AI-generated version of The Odyssey shared by Elon Musk showcased the total failure of AI movies. The tech magnate recently declared his intent to produce such a film to compete with the hit adaptation by Christopher Nolan. However, the brief sample Musk shared only underscores the inability of AI to create viable art.
Musk repeatedly criticized Nolan’s movie in the months leading up to its release. Chief among Musk’s complaints were that Nolan’s film featured diverse casting and appeared to be historically inaccurate. This ignores that The Odyssey is a mythological fantasy, full of non-existent monsters like Sirens and Cyclopes. The kvetching culminated in Musk declaring (via X) that he would produce a Grok Imagine generated feature-length version of The Odyssey by the end of 2026.
The clip which Musk shared as an apparent proof of concept drew immediate mockery on social media. The three-minute clip was full of both technical mistakes and historic anachronisms. Chief among these were scenes of Odysseus and his men wearing neon orange earplugs. Another scene shows a Greek galley with rowing benches along the length of the ship. There is also a scene featuring several women in yellow togas, presumably Sirens, engaging in a song-and-dance number.
Nolan’s Odyssey shows why art, not technology, makes great movies
If Musk was attempting to prove that Grok Imagine could equal Christopher Nolan’s version of The Odyssey, he failed miserably. To be quite frank, there is no comparison and no hope Musk could produce a quality product with this tech. Even the best generative AI programs can only manage to produce realistic scenes a few seconds long. Making a feature-length AI-generated movie would be far more expensive and time consuming than a standard Hollywood blockbuster. This is ironic given one of the main selling points of AI movies is their being promoted as faster and cheaper.
However, it should be noted that Nolan’s success as a director lies not only in his vision. Nolan is also a master administrator, who recognizes quality work. This applies not only to the ensemble of actors he assembled, but to every other creator under his aegis, like costume designers, set-builders, and lighting technicians. This is why AI cannot hope to equal true human-made art.
Many Silicon Valley moguls and some Hollywood insiders have said that AI generated movies are inevitable. Someday, they claim, the technology will equal what teams of creators accomplish today. However, while that might be true at some point, the technology is not there today, as the clip shared by Elon Musk shows.
Beyond the failure of AI, audiences have made it clear they prefer human-made art. The proof lies in the critical and commercial success of Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey. In the end, Musk would be better served paying Sydney Sweeney to strip out of a toga, as Sienna Guillory did in the 2003 Helen of Troy miniseries. It would be far cheaper and far more honest of the kind of “historically accurate” movies he wishes to finance.
