Darren Aronofsky used to be a director who made interesting, if sometimes polarizing, films like Black Swan, Mother!, Noahand The Wrestler. But it seems like a safe bet that people won’t need to debate whether Aronofsky’s new project is any good. Because anyone with eyes can see it looks like low-effort AI slop. In other words, it sounds like complete dogshit.

Aronofsky is developing a new short-form series with his AI production company Primordial Soup titled “On This Day… 1776,” according to Hollywood Reporter. The series uses technology from Google DeepMind to create short videos about the Revolutionary War, published on the YouTube channel for Time magazine. In 2018, Salesforce founder Marc Benioff bought Timeand the cloud software giant is sponsoring this giant of a series.

The series uses human voice actors who belong to the Screen Actors Guild (SAG), which is clearly an attempt to dampen the inevitable backlash from inside and outside of Hollywood. People within the movie and TV industry are pushing hard against the use of AI to replace the skilled artists and actors who create the media we watch. That concern clearly comes from a place of self-interest because no one wants to be fired from a job. But they also care about the quality of the work being done. And there’s also a revolt among average consumers, people who have been inundated with the lowest-grade AI garbage imaginable. It’s really everywhere now.

The first episode, titled “The Flag“It’s three and a half minutes long and tries to tell the story of George Washington raising the Continental Union Flag in Somerville, Massachusetts. It offers nothing compelling in the way of storytelling. It’s the kind of thing you’d skip over as a cut-scene in a bad video game.

Everything has a dead and eerie quality, as the actors’ audio is poorly synced with the AI ​​concoctions’ lips.

Have you ever seen a Spaghetti Western from the 1960s where the audio doesn’t seem to match, even though it was clearly shot with English-speaking actors, and the “dub” is in English? That happened because the audio was added in post-production, a result of direct sound recording that was expensive in Italy during the post-war period. You get the same effect here, though for no good reason. Well, for no good reason other than to probably save a ton of money hiring human actors.

The second episode, titled “Common Sense,” attempts to tell the story of Thomas Paine’s writing Common sense. Benjamin Franklin makes an appearance, although it proves that the most recognizable of the founding fathers in this series is the most amazing to watch.

The episode jumps around inconsistently, just like the first episode, without trusting the viewer with anything we should care about. It really is an ugly mess. And if you bother to pause the scenes, you may find the kind of anomalies that have been known to plague other AI-generated video projects, such as strangely deformed hands of background characters. Hands always give these things.

Then there are words that appear on the screen trailerlike the pamphlet that should have included the word “America” ​​but instead read closer to “Λamereedd.”

The series was specifically created for this sestercentennial year of the founding of America, and each episode will reportedly fall on the 250th anniversary of the day it happened, according to the Hollywood Reporter. And that’s a fun concept if the end product is something worth looking at. But no. It’s trash. The people who make and distribute it are clearly not like that.

“This project is a glimpse of what thoughtful, creative, artist-driven use of AI looks like — not replacing the craft, but expanding what’s possible and allowing storytellers to go places they couldn’t before,” Ben Bitonti, president of Time Studios, told The Hollywood Reporter.

The reaction on social media was not very good. “I know my expectations are low but holy fuck Darren Aronofsky making AI slop is not in my bingo card,” an X user WRITES. Beyond Bluesky another joked“It used to be that when Darren Aronofsky wanted to cast a dead-eyed actor, he just hired Jared Leto.”

And other users sorted out all the anomalies, with one Bluesky critic writing: “Love the new Aronofsky scene where the colonist removes his hat to cheer, revealing that underneath it’s a second and even bigger hat.”

“Nothing represents The End of America after 250 years of running like using AI slop to describe the creation of the Declaration of Independence,” another user wrote. flirting.

The videos have been on Time’s YouTube channel for over 7 hours at the time of writing, but they didn’t get much attention in their original format. The first episode had only 5,000 views. The second stage has over 2,000. Social media posts mocking the production seem to do better, simply because people are mocking them. A Bluesky video has been completed 2,500 quote postswith almost everyone seeming to joke about how awful it looks.

Gizmodo reached out to Ken Burns for comment, but did not immediately receive a response.