Connect with us

Technologies

Darren Aronofsky, Your AI Slop Is Ruining American History in ‘On This Day…1776’

Commentary: The high-profile Hollywood director created a studio dedicated to creating a “new cinematic grammar” built around AI. This is not a good start.

Just over 2 minutes into an early episode of the new short film series, On This Day…1776, we see a hand sweep tenderly over the title page of Thomas Paine’s just-published firebrand pamphlet Common Sense; Addressed to the Inhabitants of America.

Only, in that moment, “America” vanishes, replaced by the all-caps nonsense text “Aamereedd.”

It’s a classic tell that we’re in the presence of generative AI.

But this isn’t the gotcha moment you might think it is. The filmmakers behind the series, led by executive producer Darren Aronofsky, are fully embracing generative video. That’s as big a driving force behind “On This Day…1776” as the intention to tell stories of the American Revolution in this 250th anniversary year.

Aronofsky is known for directing high-profile films including Black Swan, The Whale and Mother, but he’s also the founder of Primordial Soup, the AI-first studio that created On This Day…1776. Its larger ambition, according to its website, is to fuse art and technology into a new creative model, “merging bold narrative, emotional depth, and experimental work flows.” That is, the studio wants to use AI to create bona fide art.

Good luck with that. 

Because Darren? Y’all are making a mess of it with this project.

I’ve been watching the episodes as they drop on YouTube, and I am dumbfounded. Bold narrative? More like performative staging, tipping over into self-parody. Emotional depth? About as much as you’d find on the cover of the average history textbook.

It’s hellish broth of machine-driven AI slop and bad human choices.

At least they’re on point with the whole “experimental work flows” thing. Creative people in Hollywood and beyond are staring down the barrel of artificial intelligence systems that threaten to take away their livelihoods and devalue the skills they’ve worked lifetimes to perfect. Aronofsky and Primordial Soup say they’re trying to find a way forward in blending human talent and agency with AI tools that have inevitability written all over them.

We’re living through an anxiety-ridden moment induced by powerful image and video tools like Google’s Veo and Nano Banana and OpenAI’s Sora, along with the introduction of an AI ingenue named Tilly Norwood. Two years after strikes in Hollywood over the use of AI in movies and TV shows, Walt Disney Studios in late December reached a deal with OpenAI allowing AI to slurp up characters from Marvel, Pixar and Star Wars.

In an interview with The Guardian last summer, not long after Primordial Soup launched, Aronofsky acknowledged that AI tools are being widely used to create slop, citing that as motivation. “There are a lot of artists who are fighting against AI, but I don’t see that as making any sense,” he said. “If we don’t shape these tools, somebody else will.”

But the way to fight AI slop — slick but soulless images and video, superficially articulate text that lacks any true understanding of the real world, and all of it flooding the internet — is not with more AI slop.

Which, I’m sorry, is what we’ve got with On This Day…1776.

What AI hath wrought in ‘On This Day…1776’

The episodes in On This Day…1776 are meant to recreate signature moments from that foundational year, debuting weekly on the date of the moment being depicted. They’re under 5 minutes in length, so on that basis alone, don’t expect Ken Burns’ The American Revolution.

So far, those moments include George Washington’s defiant raising of an American flag and the publication of Paine’s Common Sense. On the plus side, there’s crispness to the pacing (an artifact, perhaps, of time limits on AI’s video generation), richness of detail and a sense that the filmmakers are trying to give us a “you are there” feel.

But the overall effect lands somewhere between unsettling and laughable. The flag episode has the heavy-handed feel of a recruitment ad for the Continental Army, not any kind of meaningful narrative. A drawing room encounter between Paine and Ben Franklin would be right at home with the fabricated interactions in a corporate HR training video.

Across the episodes, there are odd directorial and editing choices. Tight shots of buckled shoes and the backs of people’s heads. The passing of a scroll from hand to hand in quick-cut scenes. Ludicrously overdramatic titling sequences introducing famous figures. An 8-second sequence in the flag episode that subjects us to closeups of one mouth after another shouting. Presumably, these filmmaking decisions were made by humans.

Then there’s the AI. Faces are waxy or rubbery, and often have a weird mix of blurring and hyperintense texture. At one point we see a hand that’s overly moist; it’s supposed to indicate fevered sweating but looks instead like an alien creation emerging from a pod. Lips are rarely synced to the words they’re speaking. Faces, especially Franklin’s, shift subtly but disturbingly. 

The AI has an especially hard time with the members of Parliament gathered to hear George III speak about the rebellious colonies. There’s a sameness across the several dozen middle-aged men in wigs crammed into the benches, not least in the smaller group shots of gents who are clearly clones of each other.

More than almost anything else, what undermines the series is its show-offy nature. We’re repeatedly subjected to intense closeups: strands of hair, the weave of a burlap bag, the woody texture of a matchstick or a ship’s mast, painfully sharp wrinkles on old men’s faces. OK, OK, we get it — AI images are getting much better at photorealism.

What we don’t get enough of from Primordial Soup is how exactly it’s using AI. The press release announcing the launch of On This Day…1776, which it describes as an “animated series,” refers vaguely to “a combination of traditional filmmaking tools and emerging AI capabilities” and to the series being “animated by artists using a variety of generative AI tools.” It also notes that the series was made “in part” with AI from Google’s DeepMind division, and that DeepMind brought us Gemini and Nano Banana as well.

The Primordial Soup website doesn’t say anything specifically about On This Day…1776, and in fact doesn’t say a lot at all. But it does have an “opportunity” page noting that it’s looking for AI artists who want to “contribute to a new cinematic grammar being built in real time” working with AI tools like Veo, Runway, Midjourney and Sora with 3D/VFX software including Blender, Unreal and Houdini.

Veo was instrumental in the making of Ancestra, the first of a planned three short films from the partnership of DeepMind and Primordial Soup that’s meant to explore new applications for Veo. Ancestra, which debuted at the Tribeca Film Festival last June, combines generative video and live-action filmmaking.

So it’s a safe bet that Veo is responsible for a lot of what we see in On This Day…1776.

Meanwhile, what of the humans involved in making the series? Again, there’s very little to go on. The episodes don’t scroll any credits for the artists, nor are they listed anywhere else that I’ve looked. The press materials say the series is “voiced by SAG actors,” but again, no individual credits. There is a reference to the score being by someone named Jordan Dykstra and to a writers’ room led by a Lucas Sussman. So that’s two humans, at least.

Representatives for Primordial Soup and Time Studios, the distributor for the series, did not respond to request for more detail.

AI’s place in history

So how does “On This Day…1776” work as a guidebook to that time in American history? Right now, two episodes in, the AI and the filmmakers’ tics are way too much of a distraction. As a costume drama, it seems all right on period appointments like clothing, housewares and such. The exterior of the Longfellow House in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Washington had his headquarters that winter, was strikingly on point — I used to walk by the real thing nearly every day, and I recognized it right away.

I was pleased to see episode 2’s focus on Common Sense, a stirring exhortation for the American colonists to oppose tyranny that was immensely influential at that time and that doesn’t always get the attention today that it deserves.

Fifty years ago, when the country was celebrating its 200th anniversary, CBS ran a series of Bicentennial Minutes that aired nightly during prime time. A famous actor, politician or other celebrity would speak directly to the camera, the graphics were low-key, and we learned a little bit about Boston’s Liberty Tree, Congress debating the Articles of Confederation or an incident on a small island in New York harbor.

They were much more humble reflections than we’re getting from Primordial Soup. I was in high school at that time and a dedicated TV viewer, and I remember enjoying those minutes, slight as they were. (Hey, I did go on to be a history major in college.) 

The press materials for “On This Day…1776” make a point of saying that its re-creations are “reframing the Revolution not as a foregone conclusion but as a fragile experiment shaped by those who fought for it.”

It’s an excellent point. The success of the American Revolution was not guaranteed, and the effort to create something new and worthwhile was often in jeopardy.

We are at a similar stage, living a real-time experiment of fitting AI into human company in a healthy, survivable way. Whether we succeed or not will be for history to judge.

I do have to point out that in the Common Sense episode, “Aamereedd” made only that one split-second appearance. In all other views of the pamphlet’s cover — I counted at least two dozen — the name of the new land showed up clear as day and correctly spelled: America.

Related Topics:

Technologies

Anthropic warns investors of AI’s ‘existential risk to humanity’ in IPO prospectus, reports say

Anthropic’s IPO filing dedicates 80 pages to the risks of AI, nearly double the 48 pages it spends discussing its business plans, according to Reuters.

Your Privacy

On this service, we and our vendors use cookies and other tools (“Cookies”) to store and access information on your device, such as device identifiers, IP address, and your browser type. Your data may be used to save and communicate your privacy choices; ensure security, prevent fraud, and debug our products and services; personalize advertising and content; for advertising and content measurement; to conduct audience research and services development; so we can improve our services and develop new ones; to match and combine offline data with your online activity; and for social features. We may share this data with select vendors with your consent. You can adjust your choices any time through the “Cookie Preferences” link in the footer of relevant Versant sites or in-app settings.

We will also use other Cookies that are essential or related to our services, including for security and fraud prevention. To learn more about some of our vendors, see the IAB and Google Vendors under each purpose. Visit our Cookie Notice and Privacy Policy to learn more.

These Cookies and SDKs are required for Service functionality, including security and fraud prevention, and to enable any purchasing capabilities. You can set your browser to block these tracking technologies, but some parts of the site may not function properly.

The choices you make regarding the purposes and entities listed in this notice are saved and made available to those entities in the form of digital signals (such as a string of characters). This is necessary in order to enable both this service and those entities to respect such choices.

Your data can be used to monitor for and prevent unusual and possibly fraudulent activity (for example, regarding advertising, ad clicks by bots), and ensure systems and processes work properly and securely. It can also be used to correct any problems you, the publisher or the advertiser may encounter in the delivery of content and ads and in your interaction with them.

Certain information (like an IP address or device capabilities) is used to ensure the technical compatibility of the content or advertising, and to facilitate the transmission of the content or ad to your device.

Cookies, device or similar online identifiers (e.g. login-based identifiers, randomly assigned identifiers, network based identifiers) together with other information (e.g. browser type and information, language, screen size, supported technologies etc.) can be stored or read on your device to recognise it each time it connects to an app or to a website, for one or several of the purposes presented here.

– Use limited data to select advertising 791 partners can use this purpose Advertising presented to you on this service can be based on limited data, such as the website or app you are using, your non-precise location, your device type or which content you are (or have been) interacting with (for example, to limit the number of times an ad is presented to you).

– Create profiles for personalised advertising 637 partners can use this purpose Information about your activity on this service (such as forms you submit, content you look at) can be stored and combined with other information about you (for example, information from your previous activity on this service and other websites or apps) or similar users. This is then used to build or improve a profile about you (that might include possible interests and personal aspects). Your profile can be used (also later) to present advertising that appears more relevant based on your possible interests by this and other entities.

– Use profiles to select personalised advertising 640 partners can use this purpose Advertising presented to you on this service can be based on your advertising profiles, which can reflect your activity on this service or other websites or apps (like the forms you submit, content you look at), possible interests and personal aspects.

– Create profiles to personalise content 261 partners can use this purpose Information about your activity on this service (for instance, forms you submit, non-advertising content you look at) can be stored and combined with other information about you (such as your previous activity on this service or other websites or apps) or similar users. This is then used to build or improve a profile about you (which might for example include possible interests and personal aspects). Your profile can be used (also later) to present content that appears more relevant based on your possible interests, such as by adapting the order in which content is shown to you, so that it is even easier for you to find content that matches your interests.

– Use profiles to select personalised content 234 partners can use this purpose Content presented to you on this service can be based on your content personalisation profiles, which can reflect your activity on this or other services (for instance, the forms you submit, content you look at), possible interests and personal aspects. This can for example be used to adapt the order in which content is shown to you, so that it is even easier for you to find (non-advertising) content that matches your interests.

– Measure advertising performance 916 partners can use this purpose Information regarding which advertising is presented to you and how you interact with it can be used to determine how well an advert has worked for you or other users and whether the goals of the advertising were reached. For instance, whether you saw an ad, whether you clicked on it, whether it led you to buy a product or visit a website, etc. This is very helpful to understand the relevance of advertising campaigns.

– Measure content performance 405 partners can use this purpose Information regarding which content is presented to you and how you interact with it can be used to determine whether the (non-advertising) content e.g. reached its intended audience and matched your interests. For instance, whether you read an article, watch a video, listen to a podcast or look at a product description, how long you spent on this service and the web pages you visit etc. This is very helpful to understand the relevance of (non-advertising) content that is shown to you.

– Understand audiences through statistics or combinations of data from different sources 579 partners can use this purpose Reports can be generated based on the combination of data sets (like user profiles, statistics, market research, analytics data) regarding your interactions and those of other users with advertising or (non-advertising) content to identify common characteristics (for instance, to determine which target audiences are more receptive to an ad campaign or to certain contents).

– Develop and improve services 688 partners can use this purpose Information about your activity on this service, such as your interaction with ads or content, can be very helpful to improve products and services and to build new products and services based on user interactions, the type of audience, etc. This specific purpose does not include the development or improvement of user profiles and identifiers.

– Use limited data to select content 180 partners can use this purpose Content presented to you on this service can be based on limited data, such as the website or app you are using, your non-precise location, your device type, or which content you are (or have been) interacting with (for example, to limit the number of times a video or an article is presented to you).

These Cookies and SDKs are used to collect data about your browsing habits, use of the Services, your preferences, and your interaction with advertisements across platforms and devices for the purpose of delivering targeted advertising content, both on our Services and on third party sites. Third-party sites and services also use Targeting Cookies to deliver content, including advertisements relevant to your interests on the Services. If you reject these Cookies or SDKs, you will see less relevant advertising.

Data collected under this category through Cookies and SDKs can also be used to select and deliver personalized content, such as news articles and videos.

Continue Reading

Technologies

U.S., Iran hold separate mediator talks as Mideast oil exports hit war-time high

Iranian and U.S. officials reportedly met separately with mediators Monday to push for a ceasefire, as Middle Eastern crude exports rebounded to war-time high.

Iranian and U.S. officials reportedly met separately with mediators Monday to push for a ceasefire.

Middle Eastern crude exports rebounded this month to around their highest level since the war began in February.

An outright export ban by Washington on diesel would keep roughly 1.2 million barrels a day at home, and risks overwhelming Gulf Coast storage, according to Kpler.

The building of the destroyed Shajareh Tayebeh primary school is pictured surrounded by rubble in Minab in Iran’s Hormozgan province on August 10, 2026. Six months on, a team of AFP journalists obtained rare access to the school which has remained largely in ruins, its collapsed walls and twisted steel now surrounded by portraits of the children killed as Iranian flags flutter above the rubble. Iran says the attack on the school involved two separate US Tomahawk missiles but neither the United States nor Israel has officially claimed responsibility for the strike. (Photo by ATTA KENARE / AFP via Getty Images) /

Atta Kenare | Afp | Getty Images

U.S. and Iranian officials have reportedly held separate indirect talks with mediators on Monday, reviving efforts to end seven months of war as Tehran presses for a response to a revised ceasefire framework and Middle East crude exports climb to their highest level since the conflict began.

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi met Qatari mediators in New York, where he remained after the United Nations General Assembly, and reportedly said he expects Washington’s reply by Tuesday. “We talked about ideas and how to find solutions to fulfil Iran’s conditions,” Araghchi said, adding that he planned to return to Tehran once a response arrives. “Whenever the Qataris have a response, they know how to get it to us.”

Iran’s proposal, first presented on the sidelines of last week’s General Assembly, calls for a four- to five-day U.S. timeline to release frozen Iranian funds, lift sanctions on Iranian oil and end the naval blockade of Iranian ports, with nuclear talks beginning within seven days. Tehran has tied any reopening of the Strait of Hormuz to those steps.

President Donald Trump had on Sunday called the plan “unacceptable” and rejected it, telling reporters Iran wants a swift deal because of the economic pressure it is under. Speaking at the White House Monday, Trump said U.S. officials had spoken separately with mediators but gave no further details, adding: “We’re going to win. It’s going to go pretty quickly.”

The diplomatic push comes as physical supply data shows the war’s toll on the oil market easing. Middle Eastern crude exports rebounded this month to around their highest level since the war began in February, Kpler data showed. “Middle East crude exports at just under 80% of pre-conflict levels,” the tracking firm said in a note on Monday.

The Strait of Hormuz itself remains far from normal. Kpler’s real-time tracking showed total clearance through the strait at 10,591 kilobarrels a day on Saturday, against a pre-war baseline of 17,133.

Continue Reading

Technologies

Oil prices fall as crude exports recover at Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea ports

Saudi Arabia has restored flows through the pipeline to around 3.5 million barrels per day, according to media reports.

Your Privacy

On this service, we and our vendors use cookies and other tools (“Cookies”) to store and access information on your device, such as device identifiers, IP address, and your browser type. Your data may be used to save and communicate your privacy choices; ensure security, prevent fraud, and debug our products and services; personalize advertising and content; for advertising and content measurement; to conduct audience research and services development; so we can improve our services and develop new ones; to match and combine offline data with your online activity; and for social features. We may share this data with select vendors with your consent. You can adjust your choices any time through the “Cookie Preferences” link in the footer of relevant Versant sites or in-app settings.

We will also use other Cookies that are essential or related to our services, including for security and fraud prevention. To learn more about some of our vendors, see the IAB and Google Vendors under each purpose. Visit our Cookie Notice and Privacy Policy to learn more.

These Cookies and SDKs are required for Service functionality, including security and fraud prevention, and to enable any purchasing capabilities. You can set your browser to block these tracking technologies, but some parts of the site may not function properly.

The choices you make regarding the purposes and entities listed in this notice are saved and made available to those entities in the form of digital signals (such as a string of characters). This is necessary in order to enable both this service and those entities to respect such choices.

Your data can be used to monitor for and prevent unusual and possibly fraudulent activity (for example, regarding advertising, ad clicks by bots), and ensure systems and processes work properly and securely. It can also be used to correct any problems you, the publisher or the advertiser may encounter in the delivery of content and ads and in your interaction with them.

Certain information (like an IP address or device capabilities) is used to ensure the technical compatibility of the content or advertising, and to facilitate the transmission of the content or ad to your device.

Cookies, device or similar online identifiers (e.g. login-based identifiers, randomly assigned identifiers, network based identifiers) together with other information (e.g. browser type and information, language, screen size, supported technologies etc.) can be stored or read on your device to recognise it each time it connects to an app or to a website, for one or several of the purposes presented here.

– Use limited data to select advertising 791 partners can use this purpose Advertising presented to you on this service can be based on limited data, such as the website or app you are using, your non-precise location, your device type or which content you are (or have been) interacting with (for example, to limit the number of times an ad is presented to you).

– Create profiles for personalised advertising 637 partners can use this purpose Information about your activity on this service (such as forms you submit, content you look at) can be stored and combined with other information about you (for example, information from your previous activity on this service and other websites or apps) or similar users. This is then used to build or improve a profile about you (that might include possible interests and personal aspects). Your profile can be used (also later) to present advertising that appears more relevant based on your possible interests by this and other entities.

– Use profiles to select personalised advertising 640 partners can use this purpose Advertising presented to you on this service can be based on your advertising profiles, which can reflect your activity on this service or other websites or apps (like the forms you submit, content you look at), possible interests and personal aspects.

– Create profiles to personalise content 261 partners can use this purpose Information about your activity on this service (for instance, forms you submit, non-advertising content you look at) can be stored and combined with other information about you (such as your previous activity on this service or other websites or apps) or similar users. This is then used to build or improve a profile about you (which might for example include possible interests and personal aspects). Your profile can be used (also later) to present content that appears more relevant based on your possible interests, such as by adapting the order in which content is shown to you, so that it is even easier for you to find content that matches your interests.

– Use profiles to select personalised content 234 partners can use this purpose Content presented to you on this service can be based on your content personalisation profiles, which can reflect your activity on this or other services (for instance, the forms you submit, content you look at), possible interests and personal aspects. This can for example be used to adapt the order in which content is shown to you, so that it is even easier for you to find (non-advertising) content that matches your interests.

– Measure advertising performance 916 partners can use this purpose Information regarding which advertising is presented to you and how you interact with it can be used to determine how well an advert has worked for you or other users and whether the goals of the advertising were reached. For instance, whether you saw an ad, whether you clicked on it, whether it led you to buy a product or visit a website, etc. This is very helpful to understand the relevance of advertising campaigns.

– Measure content performance 405 partners can use this purpose Information regarding which content is presented to you and how you interact with it can be used to determine whether the (non-advertising) content e.g. reached its intended audience and matched your interests. For instance, whether you read an article, watch a video, listen to a podcast or look at a product description, how long you spent on this service and the web pages you visit etc. This is very helpful to understand the relevance of (non-advertising) content that is shown to you.

– Understand audiences through statistics or combinations of data from different sources 579 partners can use this purpose Reports can be generated based on the combination of data sets (like user profiles, statistics, market research, analytics data) regarding your interactions and those of other users with advertising or (non-advertising) content to identify common characteristics (for instance, to determine which target audiences are more receptive to an ad campaign or to certain contents).

– Develop and improve services 688 partners can use this purpose Information about your activity on this service, such as your interaction with ads or content, can be very helpful to improve products and services and to build new products and services based on user interactions, the type of audience, etc. This specific purpose does not include the development or improvement of user profiles and identifiers.

– Use limited data to select content 180 partners can use this purpose Content presented to you on this service can be based on limited data, such as the website or app you are using, your non-precise location, your device type, or which content you are (or have been) interacting with (for example, to limit the number of times a video or an article is presented to you).

These Cookies and SDKs are used to collect data about your browsing habits, use of the Services, your preferences, and your interaction with advertisements across platforms and devices for the purpose of delivering targeted advertising content, both on our Services and on third party sites. Third-party sites and services also use Targeting Cookies to deliver content, including advertisements relevant to your interests on the Services. If you reject these Cookies or SDKs, you will see less relevant advertising.

Data collected under this category through Cookies and SDKs can also be used to select and deliver personalized content, such as news articles and videos.

Continue Reading

Trending

Copyright © Verum World Media