Elon Musk says Grok will make 'historically accurate' Odyssey film by year-end
cnn.comI don’t know what “historically accurate” even means for a fantasy movie that contains a cyclops and gods talking to humans.
I think this is probably noise and he will have moved onto something else by the end of the year.
But it does show a new potential distasteful use for gen AI: remaking or modifying movies to erase the accomplishments of people of color.
Charitably I would assume "historically accurate" refers to things like sets, clothing, etc - even with the inclusion of supernatural elements, an attempt to portray the Odyssey as something Greeks of the time might imagine while seeing the play performed.
It's funny because AI is trained on public data, much of which is based on stereotypes and media which is very historically inaccurate, and all of the attempts I've seen at "history with AI" look right to the layman but fall apart as soon as a historian sees them. Greek myth is particularly bad because it often has to be reframed around recognizable Judeo-Christian morality (Hades being a Satan analogue being one obvious example) and modern anachronisms to be palatable to modern audiences.
The concept is intellectually interesting because it would play with the idea that "the past is a foreign country," but it's exactly the sort of thing you wouldn't want to do with an AI at all.
... that said we all know "historically accurate" more often than not means "no black people," since Musk has literally called Nolan an "anti-white racist" for casting Lupita Nyong'o as Helen of Troy. Even though the presence of black Africans within the ancient Greek world would have been perfectly historically accurate, and it's a myth with monsters and gods and bullshit.
- It’s not a play, it’s a poem.
- Greeks of which time? Those of mythical setting, rooted in the Bronze Age? Those of the several centuries when it was an oral history? Or those of the many centuries of it being a written work (during which a myriad of interpretations were put to pottery for our perusal)?
- What about non-Greek interpretations? The long Hellenistic and Roman epochs gave us a vast number of syncretisms…
- Famously (among classicists) the works themselves (more the Illiad here) are a historical muddle, including both surprising Bronze Age accuracies (Ajax’s shield; digamma implied in the meter) and clear Iron Age anachronisms (how chariots are used).
Did you just need to meet a quota for pedantic nitpicking or something? JFC.
I would have let it be were it not for the “play” part! That’s what roused the pedant.
More exciting than such an AI-generated movie would be all of the prompts approved for the final product (unless the prompts themselves were to be mostly AI-generated).
The most exciting thing about a historically accurate version will be all the butt sex.
The self-proclaimed „genius“ apparently doesn’t get that there were no cyclops and gods in Ancient Greece…
Special K Edition
Ahaha, yeah. Just like the "hysterically accurate" versions of the several Ruzzian invasions in his Elonopedia. Let me guess, Odyssey in his slop-fiction will be a white evangelical with a harem of his white evangelical tradwifes, traveling on a golden hulled Trump battleship across Mediterranean and conquering unwashed barbarian hordes, is that about correct?
PS: the OP link and the whole discussion is about a known biased generator of automated lies and propaganda (grok), so it's only fair to mock it.