‘Black Swan’ Director Mocked For AI-Generated Series About The American Revolution

Academy Award-nominated American director and filmmaker Darren Aronofsky is being questioned for his new AI-generated series, “On This Day… 1776.”

The 56-year-old filmmaker, best known for dark dramas including “Requiem for a Dream” (2000), “Black Swan” (2010), and “The Whale” (2022), is producing the series with his AI-based company Primordial Soup. “On This Day” will use Google DeepMind to reconstruct scenes from the American Revolution and post them to Time Studio’s YouTube channel, per The Hollywood Reporter.

The series has a stated goal of “reframing the Revolution not as a foregone conclusion but as a fragile experiment shaped by those who fought for it,” the companies said in a statement. Episodes will be released to coincide with the 250th anniversary dates as they occurred throughout this year.

Two episodes, one featuring George Washington boosting morale in Massachusetts and another with Benjamin Franklin encouraging Thomas Paine to champion common sense, were released yesterday.

Aronofsky has been vocal about using AI as a tool, and not as a replacement for filmmaking. He insists that the creations are “soup not slop,” and are worthy of watching. Many fans, however, are less than thrilled about it. 

“Wow this looks like a hunk of worthless dog sh*t,” Daily Wire podcast host Matt Walsh wrote on X in response to the trailer. 

“A director should completely lose their career for this. [H]is wikipedia should say former filmmaker from now on no matter what else he does,” another commenter agreed. 

“My favorite part of this garbage is how you can see which actors the different characters lifts their looks from (due to unlawful usage of their likeness in the training data) and how these characters slowly morph into different actors during scenes,” said a third X user.

“This look [sic] awful,” another popular comment said. “It has that weird uncanny valley AI sheen on it as usual. AI also always has boring, predictable camera movements. Slow rotations and pans every time. I see the standard AI dead eyed line deliveries are present as well.”