If you happen to find yourself stumbling through Time magazine’s YouTube account, perhaps because you are a time traveller from the 1970s who doesn’t fully understand how the present works yet – then you will 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 America’s revolutionary war. What makes On This Day notable is that it was made by Darren Aronofsky’s studio Primordial Soup. What also makes it interesting is that it was created with AI. The third thing that makes it interesting is that it is terrible.
The first episode, which is three and a half minutes long, sees George Washington raise a new flag over Prospect Hill, in defiance of King George III. It is the moment, according to the video’s description, that “rebellion becomes resolve”. And if that dollop of ChatGPT-sounding sloganeering terrifies the life out of you, wait until you actually watch the thing.
It is, as you might expect, as ugly as sin. It’s the sort of thing that looks like it was shooting for photorealism, but then either chickened out or blew up along the way. In the very first shot, King George’s hair looks like someone melted down and hardened a plastic badger. And this is a shame because, like so much generative AI at the moment, an awful lot of the episode consists of shots where we see the characters from behind. This is, after all, because the back of an AI-generated head is far less likely to send people into screaming fits of trauma than an AI-generated face, and Aronofsky is a humanist.
Because, good lord, the faces. Since the revolutionary war was largely initiated by older men, On This Day is filled with the wrinkled almost-faces of several well-known figures. And it is truly disconcerting to see, not only because they all have the uncanny dead eyes of people ripped out of The Polar Express, but because the wrinkles keep shifting in colour and depth.
It’s an effect that makes it look like the characters were drawn on several sheets of tissue paper that nobody could line up properly. Benjamin Franklin, who turns up during episode two, is particularly nightmarish. He looks as if someone has genetically spliced Hugh Laurie with Anthony Hopkins, and then covered the resulting monstrosity in a thin layer of roving liver spots. I’m overselling the point here, but it really is extremely creepy to watch.
On This Day has already made headlines for being a little bit of a cop-out, since all the voices are performed by human actors, who presumably needed to feed their families more than they wanted to protect their profession from annihilation. And this is telling, because these voices are by far the most convincing part of On This Day, especially when deployed in voiceover, because then you aren’t distracted by the way the movement of their mouths doesn’t quite match up with the noises coming out of them.
But surely the day is coming where they won’t be needed. As horrible as it is, On This Day is already strides better than a lot of other AI-generated output. True, the whole thing still looks like a mangled cross between an animatronic sex toy convention and those old Taiwanese news cartoons, but compare a character here with Tilly Norwood, and you can see that real progress has been made in a frighteningly short amount of time. Soon we will have picture-perfect AI creations with entirely convincing human voices. After that, it won’t be long before content like On This Day is entirely created – written, acted, directed and edited – by prompt alone. And when that happens, Aronofsky can pat himself on the back for doing himself out of a job.
It will be interesting to see how the human film industry reacts to On This Day, particularly other actors. We’ve already seen, in Tilly Norwood, that these creations appear to be modelled on human faces, and this is even more the case here. In particular, the depiction of Thomas Paine seems like it flashes through the faces of any number of recognisable actors. The key one seems to be Ralph Fiennes, but there are also glimmers of Daniel Day-Lewis and Matthew Macfadyen.
Less than two years ago Scarlett Johansson hired legal counsel after she noticed that an OpenAI application had a voice that was “eerily similar” to hers. In a climate like this, it isn’t out of the question to imagine that actors will start doing the same if they recognise their likeness in an AI-generated performer.
But this is a concern for another time. What matters now is that On This Day … 1776 is genuinely very horrible to watch, and everybody involved should be ashamed. It is by far the most disturbing thing Aronofsky has made, and I’ve seen the last eight minutes of Requiem for a Dream.