Elon Musk has released the first episode of an AI-generated Odyssey, a little over seven minutes long and made with Grok Imagine, the video generator from his company xAI.
The project is a collaboration between Wonder Studios and director Dev Walker, both of which specialize in generative AI filmmaking, according to the Grok Imagine account. Several more episodes are planned. The first covers the Greeks' arrival at Troy. Odysseus is the only named character, every character is white, and the video shows familiar AI-video flaws: overly perfect teeth, weightless hair, smudgy skin and backgrounds that pop in at low resolution before sharpening.
The delivery does not quite match the pledge. In July, Musk posted that Grok Imagine would make a full-length Odyssey movie before the year ended, one that would be "historically accurate and true to the art of Homer." What exists so far is an episodic series, with the full-length version still unfinished. MuskOmeter, a site that tracks his promises, puts his hit rate at about 24 percent.
The context is a long feud with Christopher Nolan's adaptation. Musk said in February that Nolan had "lost his integrity," and criticism from him and others focused on the casting of Lupita Nyong'o as Helen of Troy and Elliot Page as Sinon. The "historical accuracy" argument is shaky, since Helen is a figure of Greek mythology and historians still debate whether the Trojan War happened at all. Critics of Nolan predicted a flop. The film opened to $124.5 million in July and has since passed $1.7 billion worldwide.
So the AI version reads less like a rival film than a rebuttal, and a thin one. Wonder Studios promoted it with the line "Homer didn't have Grok... we do." Nolan has called the idea of AI replacing human creativity "a nonsense."
The human-made option is easy to find. Nolan's film reaches digital release on November 17, and Wolfgang Petersen's Troy, revived by Nolan's success, holds a 3.5 average on Letterboxd.