Primordial Soup: Darren Aronofsky’s AI slop YouTube series is getting caned ... and rightly so

Darren Aronofsky named his latest venture Primordial Soup but the swamp which produced the origins of life looks more to be the harbinger of death.

Soup, not slop, it was supposed to go. But it’s slop, definitely slop.

Aronofsky is generally considered a cinematic auteur, an art-driven filmmaker who has made challenging movies including Black Swan, Requiem for a Dream, Mother and The Whale. He has been nominated for a directing Oscar. He’s married to Rachel Weisz.

But this past week, he’s come to personify a great betrayal.

Aronofsky and the company he founded, Primordial Soup, created a series of YouTube videos for Time magazine to coincide with the 250th anniversary of the American republic. They’re called On this Day … 1776.

They’re little vignettes dramatising moments during the Revolutionary War in which a fledgling America fought off King George and broke away from England’s autocratic rule. So far, inoffensive.

But if you press play on either of the two episodes that have been released you’ll notice a little box that pops up in the top left-hand corner. It says, “altered or synthetic content”.

On this Day … 1776 was made with AI. Uh oh. A filmmaker such as Aronofsky is not supposed to be associated so closely with AI. The comments beneath are vicious.

Usually, a comment section is not somewhere you want to trawl, but in this scenario, it’s nothing but laughs, ranging from the very serious observation, “it’s just like poop from a butt” to “as someone who loathes creativity, vision and art, this is awesome!”.

It probably wasn’t even necessary for YouTube to declare that it was “altered or synthetic content” because it’s pretty obvious to anyone with eyes. Some of the close-ups of human characters are so waxen that a Madame Tussaud’s figure would look more realistic.

The images are flat, the compositions too perfect in a way that would make even Wes Anderson blanch, and there are way too many shots of the backs of heads (which is still preferable to the front of an AI one).

The editing is also deranged, slicing through shots at a rapid pace as if to induce an epileptic fit.

The production might have used real-life voice actors, but the AI can’t quite match the words spoken with the AI characters doing the speaking.

While every character appears to have the requisite number of fingers, a human set designer or props person might’ve picked up AI mistakes such as when a pamphlet shown on screen morphs the word AMERICA to AAMEREEDD to AMERICO in the span of two seconds.

The end credits detail that it was “made in part with AI from Google DeepMind” which is just another reminder that names like “DeepMind” is really not that far from “SkyNet”. Just saying.

Slop, not soup.

Worse than regular slop is one that pretends to be soup, one that hails from a respected filmmaker.

Time Studios president Ben Bitonti said in a statement accompanying its release, “This project is a glimpse of what thoughtful, creative, artist-led use of AU can look like – not replacing craft, but expanding what’s possible and allowing storytellers to go places they simply couldn’t before.”

It’s not clear from the two released episodes what they contain that couldn’t have been achieved “before” unless what’s not being said is “on the cheap”. Period costumes and set designs are expensive, yes, but it’s certainly achievable.

Aronofsky has yet to directly address the backlash to his work, and he may not have many backers in the creative community.

AI has become another front in Hollywood as the industry faces myriad challenges posed by tech companies and Silicon Valley.

Entertainment businesses have been open to experimenting and dipping their toes, especially if the technology will offer cost-savings. Netflix co-chief executive Ted Sarandos has said that the streamer was excited to “leverage new technical capabilities as they come online”.

Disney signed a deal with OpenAI to allow a selection of its intellectual property to be made available on Sora, and has also taken a stake in the company. Soon, it will allow some of those user-generated videos to be integrated into its streaming platform, Disney+.

But artists and creative people are less keen. Two weeks ago, more than 700 industry workers including Cate Blanchett, Scarlett Johansson and Joseph Gordon-Levitt united for an anti-AI campaign. It called out tech companies for stealing their work without permission.

Filmmaker Guillermo del Toro did not equivocate when asked on his view last year. “AI, particularly generative AI – I am not interested,” he told NPR. “I’m 61, and I hope to be able to remain uninterested in using it at all until I croak.

“The other day, somebody wrote me an email and said, ‘What is your stance on AI’. And my answer was very short. I said, ‘I’d rather die’.”