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Last week, filmmaker Darren Aronofsky and his company, Primordial Soup, collaborated with Time magazine to launch the first videos in a new series titled On This Day… 1776. This ambitious project, scheduled to run for one full year, uses various artificial intelligence tools to create short videos about daily events during the American Revolution. The videos feature highly realistic digital versions of famous historical figures, including George Washington, Thomas Paine, and Benjamin Franklin.
In the project announcement, Ben Bitonti, President of Time Studios, described the work as a new kind of exploration. He stated that the series offers a glimpse at what thoughtful, creative, and artist-led use of AI can look like. Bitonti emphasized that this technology is not meant to replace human craft but to expand what is possible, allowing storytellers to reach places they could not before. Therefore, the series is viewed as a new creative tool rather than a replacement for human artists.
However, early reviews from critics have been overwhelmingly negative. The AV Club noted that the first episodes featured repetitive camera movements and characters that looked waxy, calling the result an ugly look at American history. CNET used even stronger language, labeling the videos as AI slop that is ruining American history. The Guardian also criticized the project, stating that the director of famous films like Black Swan has drowned himself in AI slop. The newspaper described the series as embarrassing and ugly.
Despite this loud criticism, the team at Primordial Soup is not stopping. A project source, who asked to remain anonymous, told Ars Technica that they expect the quality of later episodes to improve. They explained that this improvement will occur as the team learns more about using their AI tools over the course of the year. The source stated, "We're going into this fully assuming that we have a lot to learn, that this process is gonna evolve, the tools we're using are gonna evolve. We're gonna make mistakes. We're gonna learn a lot… we're going to get better at it, and the technology will change."
It is important to understand that On This Day… 1776 is not made completely by AI. According to The Hollywood Reporter, human writers wrote the script for the story. The writing was supervised by Ari Handel and Lucas Sussman, who are longtime partners of Darren Aronofsky. Because humans wrote the script, some criticisms about the dialogue sounding like it came from an AI chatbot may be partly misplaced.
The production source confirmed that the project was always meant to be written by people. The creative team did a significant amount of planning and historical research to determine the best way to tell the story. The source noted, "I don't think they even needed that kind of help or wanted that kind of AI-powered writing help. We've all experimented with AI-powered writing and the chatbots out there, and you know what kind of quality you get out of that."
Additionally, the producers say that all spoken lines are performed by real, professional voice actors. These actors belong to the Screen Actors Guild, and the team did not use AI to create the voices. While union rules likely influenced this decision, the source also explained that the AI-generated voices they tested sounded very fake and were not good enough for the final product. The source explained that human professionals are also in charge of many other important parts of the project, including music, editing, sound design, visual effects, and color grading. The use of AI-powered tools is mainly limited to creating the video footage itself. The official announcement describes the process as a combination of traditional filmmaking tools and emerging AI capabilities.
In practice, this hybrid method works in a specific way. Human artists first create storyboards. They gather visual references for the locations and characters and decide on the camera angles. This visual and story information, along with the script, is then given to an AI video generation model. The AI model creates the shots one by one. After that, human editors put the shots together and polish them in a standard post-production process.
This new process is more advanced than Primordial Soup's last project, a short film called Ancestra. That film, made with Google DeepMind last summer, used AI to add effects to live-action footage. The current series attempts to create the main video scenes directly from written prompts.
In theory, an AI model that can make a scene in minutes seems to save a huge amount of time. Traditional filmmaking involves finding locations, hiring actors, and building sets. However, the production source said the process for On This Day… 1776 is highly iterative, meaning the team has to try over and over. Creating and perfecting shots for each short video takes weeks. Deadlines often have to be extended.
Even though the AI is animating realistic-looking digital people, the source compared the process to live-action filmmaking. This is because the team does not have fine, predictable control over what the AI creates. The source explained, "You don't know if you're gonna get what you want on the first take or the 12th take or the 40th take."
Some shots are finished faster than others, but the AI almost never makes a perfect shot on the very first try. Sometimes small problems can be fixed later with visual effects or editing. More often, the team has to tell the AI to generate a completely new version of the video with different instructions. The source said, "It still takes a lot of work, and it's not necessarily because it's wrong, per se, so much as trying to get the right control because you might want the light to land on the face in the right way to try to tell the story. We're still striving for the same amount of control that we always have with live-action production to really maximize the story and the emotion."
AI video technology has improved significantly since earlier, flawed examples. But problems like the AI creating strange or nonsensical images are still a problem for this production. Because of this technical limit, the team decided to make a series of short videos instead of one long movie. The source explained, "It's one thing to stay consistent within three minutes. It's a lot harder and it takes a lot more work to stay consistent within two hours. I don't know what the upper limit is now, but the longer you get, the more things start to fall off."
Keeping the shots short also gives the creators more control. It reduces the need for expensive reshoots in this AI-animated context. The source noted, "When you think about it, if you're trying to create a 20-second clip, you have all these things that are happening, and if one of those things goes wrong in 20 seconds, you have to start over. And the chance of something going wrong in 20 seconds is pretty high. The chance of something going wrong in eight seconds is a lot lower."
The source would not give the exact budget but strongly suggested that this AI-driven process is still much cheaper than filming a similar historical show on location with traditional methods. They said, "I mean, we could never achieve what we're doing here for this amount of money, which I think is pretty clear when you watch this." The source promised that future episodes would show scenes that cameras just can't even do, using the unique potential of the medium.
AI-generated video is developing very quickly. One might think that soon, AI models could make Hollywood-quality movies from simple text commands alone. However, the experience of making On This Day… 1776 has shown that human creative oversight is still absolutely necessary. The source reflected, "Personally, I don't think we're ever gonna get there replacing human editors. We actually desperately need an editor. We need another set of eyes who can look at the cut and say, 'If we get out of this shot a little early, then we can create a little bit of urgency. If we linger on this thing a little longer…' You still really need that."
This view might make human editors feel more secure. At the same time, the series imagines a future where human actors on screen could be replaced by AI-generated digital characters. When asked if the producers believe AI is ready to take on this very human role now, the source was careful and uncertain. They admitted, "I don't know that we do know that, honestly. I think we know that the technology is there to try. And I think as storytellers we're really interested in using all the different tools that we can to try to get our story across and to try to make audiences feel something."
The source described the project as a response to a rare chance to use new technology. They said, "It's not often that we have huge new tools like this. I mean, it's never happened in my lifetime. But when you do get these new tools, you want to start playing with them. We have to try things in order to know if it works, if it doesn't work." They ended with a feeling of open exploration, stating, "So, you know, we have the tools now. Let's see what we can do."