Darren Aronofsky’s AI American Revolution Is Even Worse Than It Looks

For as long as there have been wars, there have been re-enactors. The Ancient Romans staged naval battles in flooded amphitheaters. In the late 19th century, survivors of the Battle of the Little Bighorn re-enacted their own defeat. To this day, there are many communities of history buffs gathered to recreate skirmishes all over the world.

All of these re-enactments share one thing: people, usually experts or just passionate fans, putting themselves in the buckled shoes of those who have come before. But for the 250th anniversary of 1776, the year of America’s founding, acclaimed director Darren Aronofsky is making a soulless, AI-generated recreation of the year that sounds bad, looks worse, and can’t even get basic facts right.

Primordial Soup, Aronofsky’s AI studio, recently announced “On This Day...1776,” a series of short videos posted to Time’s YouTube channel that will tell the story of the events of the Revolution 250 years to the day after it happened. On the surface, this is a fine idea. A massively popular YouTube series even did the same thing with WW1 for the conflict’s centennial from 2014 to 2018. It’s the method that is this series’ downfall: none of the figures seen in these clips are real — they’re all AI-generated.

Even if you didn’t know the method behind this series, it soon becomes very obvious. AI cinematic technology is still in its infancy, so it’s hard to make a clip longer than about 10 seconds or make a clip where anything interesting happens. The result is a boring montage of tableaus with soft pans or zooms, often limited to close-ups of one guy. There are constant labels as to who is who, because if you thought it was difficult to keep track of historical white guys before, these fake white guys are basically identical. In perhaps one of the funniest moments, King George is shown snatching a paper out of his aide’s hand, but because of the limitations of the AI tech, it’s cobbled together through a series of jump cuts like Liam Neeson jumping the fence in Taken.

The series claims that not everything is AI-generated, as real SAG member actors provide the voices (though there isn’t a credit in sight). But it doesn’t matter if you have Meryl Streep reading the lines: AI can’t generate a good actor. Because these images are created through prompts, there’s no nuance. Faces look worried, angry, proud, or happy, with no variation, and wrinkles appear and disappear in the same shot, like instant Botox.

But at least the AI generation means that events can be shown with more historical accuracy, right? Wrong! In one clip, George Washington walks out of a house with what looks to be modern door hinges and vinyl siding. In another, a copy of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense morphs the word “America” into something that looks more like “Aamerledd.”

Even the one part that is human-created, the dialogue, has inaccuracies. In the episode dated January 1, 1776, George Washington is shown telling his men that “It is not in the pages of history, perhaps, to furnish a case like ours. To maintain a post within musket shot of the enemy for six months, and at the same time, to disband one army and recruit another.” But Washington (as far as we know) never said this to his troops — instead, he wrote it in a letter to John Hancock, and even then, it wasn’t January 1 — it was January 4.

Later, he says, “We are now the troops of the United Colonies of North America!” But even the video itself takes issue with that, as the closed captions read “United Provinces of North America.” Sure enough, the captions are more accurate: that’s a quote from George Washington’s General Orders from July 4, 1775.

So if this series looks terrible and isn’t even historically accurate, then what’s the point? Probably the Salesforce sponsorship. If you’re looking for an actually good depiction of how America came to be, turn to Ken Burns’ recent PBS docuseries The American Revolution, which boasts voice actors like Tom Hanks and Morgan Freeman reading actual verbatim quotes from history and input from real, flesh-and-blood historians.

I don’t claim to know what the Founding Fathers fought for, but what they built cost actual human lives. They deserve to be depicted accurately by actual humans at the very least, but that’s apparently too much to ask from this series.