Grok's AI-made 'Odyssey' arrives, and it is hard to watch

On July, Elon Musk said that Grok Imagine, the AI image and video generator from his company SpaceXSI, would deliver a full-length, “historically accurate” version of Homer’s The Odyssey before the year was out. Three months later, the first result has landed: a seven-minute video that Grok calls Episode 1 of an 'Odyssey series'.

It was made in collaboration with AI film studio Wonder Studios, with AI content creator Dev Walker as director. However, it arrives in the shadow of a very different adaptation. Christopher Nolan’s film opened in July and has been more than a hit. It took over $1.1 billion worldwide in under a month, the highest total of his career, and earned his best-ever critics’ score on Rotten Tomatoes. Many classicists have embraced it as a spectacle, including the IMAX visual design, though some criticised how it handles Homer’s complex themes.

So, how does Grok's version compare? Not well, as you would expect.

If you do not already know the story, you will end the seven minutes knowing even less than when you started. The video jumps from clip to clip with no clear direction, and nothing tells you who anyone is. The sudden time skips make the whole thing feel like a poorly made trailer, not an episode of what would be called a movie or a series.

The dialogue is corny and random, and it explains nothing about what is happening on screen. An ominous voiceover runs throughout, yet it adds no context either. In fairness, a few shots look lifelike, and anyone who did not know this was AI-generated might be fooled for the first few seconds. But the bad lighting and the stiff way the characters move will soon give it away. Some of the action and scenery also felt too similar to scenes from Game of Thrones, which made me wonder if Musk fed the show to this model.

Historical accuracy - the thing Musk was striving for - is hard to judge in this video, as there is little on screen to test it against. The characters speak English with a slightly British accent, and the island looked to me more like Scotland than Greece. Neither is a good sign for a project that promised to stay true to Homer.

What remains is a run of clips of men shouting at each other, with no context and no backstory. Even as a trailer, I doubt it would stir any emotion in a human audience, and I do not think many people would want to watch beyond these seven minutes. I barely managed to.

If you want to marvel at a bad AI-generated film, you can watch it here. If not, you will thank yourself for skipping it, like all the other AI slop that pops up on your X (formerly Twitter) feed these days.