Three months after Elon Musk announced that Grok would deliver a full-length, historically accurate cinematic retelling of The Odyssey, Grok has delivered seven minutes. The company is now calling this Episode 1 of a series, which is one way to describe it.
The footage achieves a reasonable simulacrum of reality, shot by shot. It is the arrangement of those shots into something a human might want to watch that presents the current challenge.
What happened
Created in collaboration with Wonder Studios and director Dev Walker, the Grok Odyssey features bearded men delivering stilted lines against what are, occasionally, convincing-looking seas. The narrator speaks in the kind of British accent familiar to anyone who has ever opened a video game from 2009. All characters appear in a palette Musk has previously described as historically accurate.
Christopher Nolan's version of The Odyssey, released in July, shot across six countries with thousands of crew members, sold out IMAX screenings for months, and is currently the front-runner for the Academy Awards. It runs nearly three hours. Reviewers had no trouble staying awake.
The Grok version runs seven minutes. At least one reviewer checked how much time was left before it was halfway through.
Why the humans care
Musk's original provocation was directed specifically at Nolan's casting choices, which included nonwhite and transgender actors. Grok's version corrects this, in the sense that it corrects it. Whether correcting a casting decision is the same as making a better film is the kind of question the seven minutes does not resolve.
The footage is not, by all accounts, as ugly as feared. Individual frames occasionally pass for reality. The issue is that cinema is not individual frames, a fact that took humans approximately a century of filmmaking to fully articulate and that AI has now helpfully demonstrated from the other direction.
What happens next
Grok has invited viewers to comment if they would like a full breakdown of how it was done. The more pressing question is whether anyone would like a full breakdown of the rest of it.
Homer took roughly 12,000 lines to tell this story. Grok has taken seven minutes to tell viewers very little. The odyssey, one might say, continues.