If Elon Musk really enjoys his AI Odyssey remake, he should seek help

Tell me, Muse, of the adventures of a man. A man of resources, driven time and again off course, having plundered the sacred town of Troy. Or if you can’t be bothered, O Muse, just pull up the link to Elon Musk’s Wikipedia page and call it close enough.

It’s been some months now since Musk, memelord Odysseus of Big Tech Ithaca, first set his sights on The Odyssey, Homer’s classic epic of hubris and consequence. Musk – the much-despised CEO of Tesla and SpaceX – was one of the loudest critics of the “historical inaccuracies” in Christopher Nolan’s film adaptation. (These largely boiled down to the inclusion of non-white actors among its dozens-strong cast, and, in Elliot Page, the casting of a trans man playing the Greek soldier Sinon.) Nolan was, said Musk at the time, an “anti-white racist”. A wider right-wing boycott ultimately proved about as effective as a Trojan horse made entirely of glass: The Odyssey opened to rave reviews, and has earned $1.794bn, making it the 11th biggest film of all time. Still, Nolan’s Odyssey faced another threat: a rival Odyssey adaptation, proposed by Musk and developed entirely using AI. This one, claimed Musk, would be “historically accurate and true to the art of Homer”.

To the surprise of no one, such a movie has not materialised. Instead, on Friday, Musk’s AI platform Grok Imagine shared a seven-minute-long video of pure AI slop, billed as the first “episode” of the Odyssey adaptation. It is crappy and repellent, and abjectly unconvincing in the way that AI’s attempts to mimic traditional moviemaking always are. (Amusingly, it seems to have ripped some of its aesthetics straight from the Nolan film, with the oh-so-scandalously anachronistic horsehair-crested helmets making an appearance.) The video is a waste of time, money and attention, and people have inevitably seen right through it.

If anything, the risible Odyssey “episode” serves as heartening proof that AI is nowhere near ready to replace traditional filmmaking. What it’s producing is fundamentally unreleasable in any commercial format; there is nothing of value in it. AI is an active danger to the film industry; don’t get me wrong – its integration is already eroding job opportunities for skilled craftspeople, artists, designers, crewmembers, writers, background actors and stunt performers, and this is a problem that will only get worse. But the notion that people will accept these wholly alien facsimiles of cinema is nonsense. It does beg the question, however: does Musk actually think the AI Odyssey is any good?

There are, essentially, two possibilities. The first, that Musk can see his AI Odyssey for the crud that it is, and is simply promoting the film in an effort to further the financial interests of his AI company, Grok. The second possibility is somehow even more damning – that Musk is bereft of basic artistic comprehension, and genuinely believes that the cinematic abomination he commissioned has any kind of artistic worth. Whichever way you slice it, it’s a bad look.

A year ago, octogenarian novelist Joyce Carol Oates wrote a memorably eviscerating assessment of Musk. She noted how “curious” it was that “such a wealthy man never posts anything that indicates that he enjoys or is even aware of what virtually everyone appreciates [...] In fact, he seems totally uneducated, uncultured. The poorest persons on Twitter may have access to more beauty and meaning in life than the ‘most wealthy person in the world’.” A nerve having perhaps been struck, Musk spent the following day commenting things like “great movie!” under tweets about old films.

Oates’ diagnosis seemed to hit the nail on the head. For all Musk’s attempts to insert himself into the world of pop culture – including egomaniacal guest appearances on The Simpsons and Saturday Night Live – he has never managed to sell himself as a man of culture. He is not funny, despite a transparent desire to be.

In championing this abysmal AI Odyssey, though, Musk is dragging his reputation to new lows. For his sake, I hope he’s privately as repulsed by Grok’s Odyssey remake as most viewers have been. If not, you have to question Musk’s basic faculties. Is the man once branded as a modern tech “genius” actually a complete idiot? Are our overlords incapable of the sort of aesthetic savvy that even a child can intuit? I suppose it’s not the end of the world if this is true. We can always ask Grok to generate a new trillionaire, one that’s “intellectually accurate” for a change. I’m sure it’ll be even better than the real thing.