IIf you find yourself bumping into Time magazine’s YouTube account—perhaps because you’re a time traveler to the 1970s who doesn’t yet fully understand how the present works—you’ll be presented with something that many believe represents the vanguard of entertainment as we know it.
On This Day…1776 is a series of short videos depicting the American Revolutionary War. What makes On This Day notable is that it was created by Darren Aronofsky’s studio Primordial Soup. What makes it interesting is that it is built with AI. The third thing that makes it interesting is that it’s terrifying.
The first episode, which is three and a half minutes long, shows George Washington raising a new flag on Prospect Hill in defiance of King George III. According to the video’s description, this is the moment when “rebellion becomes resolution”. And if ChatGPT-sounding blabbering scares the life out of you, wait until you actually see the thing.
As you might expect, it’s as ugly as sin. It’s the kind of thing that looks like it was shooting for photorealism, but then either got busted or got blown up along the way. In the very first shot, King George’s hair looks as if someone has melted a plastic badger and hardened it. And that’s a shame because, like much of generative AI at the moment, a large portion of the episode is made up of shots where we see the characters from behind. After all, that’s because the back of an AI-generated head is much less likely to make people scream in trauma than the back of an AI-generated face, and Aronofsky is a humanitarian.
Because, oh lord, faces. Since the Revolutionary War was largely started by older people, the day is filled with the wrinkled faces of many famous figures. And it’s really frustrating to watch, not only because they all have the ethereal dead eyes of people plucked from The Polar Express, but because the wrinkles vary in color and depth.
This is an effect that makes it look as if the characters were drawn on multiple sheets of tissue paper that no one could line up properly. Benjamin Franklin, who arrives during episode two, is particularly nightmarish. It’s as if someone genetically combined Hugh Laurie with Anthony Hopkins, and then covered the resulting monstrosity in a thin layer of swirling liver spots. I may be overstating the issue here, but it really is extremely scary to watch.
On This Day has already made headlines for being a bit of a cop-out, as all the voices are performed by human actors who probably have more to do with saving their profession from destruction than they need to feed their families. And that’s telling, because these voices are by far the most solid part of On This Day, especially when deployed in voiceover, because then you’re not distracted by the fact that their mouth movements don’t match the sounds coming out of them.
But surely the day is coming when they will not be needed. As terrible as it is, On This Day is already better than many other AI-generated outputs. True, the whole thing still looks like a confused cross between an animatronic sex toy convention and those old Taiwanese news cartoons, but compare a character here to Tilly Norwood, and you can see that real progress has been made in a frighteningly short time. Soon we will have picture-perfect AI creations with completely convincing human voices. After that, it won’t be long before content like On This Day is created entirely by prompts – written, acted, directed and edited. And when that happens, Aronofsky can pat himself on the back for getting himself out of a job.
It will be interesting to see how the human film industry reacts to On This Day, especially other actors. We have already seen in Tilly Norwood that these compositions appear to be based on human faces, and this is even more the case here. In particular, Thomas Paine’s portrayal seems as if it’s beamed onto the faces of several recognizable actors. Chief among them appears to be Ralph Fiennes, but there are also glimpses of Daniel Day-Lewis and Matthew Macfadyen.
Less than two years ago, Scarlett Johansson hired legal counsel when she noticed that an OpenAI application had a voice that sounded like hers. In such an environment, it is not impossible to imagine that actors would start doing the same if they recognized their likeness in an AI-generated artist.
But that is a concern for another time. What matters now is that on this day… 1776 is truly an awful lot to look at, and everyone involved should be ashamed. This is the most disturbing thing Aronofsky has ever made, and I’ve watched the last eight minutes of Requiem for a Dream.
