“Soup not slop.” Such is Darren Aronofsky’s stated intention for On This Day… 1776, a shortform YouTube series recreating pivotal Revolutionary War-era moments with SAG voice actors and AI visuals courtesy of Google DeepMind — and were you to catch a thumbnail for its trailer on a social media scroll, you might initially presume he’s succeeded.
Its topic is respectably weighty — a far cry from the cruel and puerile jokes generative AI has so often been used for, like that 2025 video of Trump literally dropping shit on protesters. Its sets and costumes appear, from a distance, to evoke prestige projects like John Adams or Franklin. Its faces are realistic enough to pass muster, at least some of the time.
But keep watching for more than a few seconds, and it quickly becomes apparent that slop is slop, no matter how it’s gussied up. On This Day positions itself as a well-funded, high-profile, apparently good-faith effort to demonstrate how AI might be deployed as a tool to enhance rather than replace human artistry. Instead, it only goes to show that the problem with AI in filmmaking runs deeper than its technical limitations.
It is, however, those technical limitations that trip up the eye first when trying to watch the two currently released episodes of On This Day, “January 1: The Flag” and “January 10: Common Sense.” There’s the flat, plasticky sheen that sends all of its characters careening into the uncanny valley. The movements that feel too jerky and weightless to seem real. The random unforced errors, like a hairbrush that glides along a lock of hair without actually going through it. These flaws are not incidental to the experience of watching AI-generated content but, at this point, central to it: You can tell something was made by computers if it looks polished to the point of lifelessness and yet nonsensical in its details.
Try very hard to look beyond all that, though, and you’re rewarded with a nonexistent storyline and dialogue so boilerplate it might as well be rendered in the non-language AI tends to spit out in images of written words. Per the statement sent out this week, the series’ aim is “reframing the Revolution not as a foregone conclusion but as a fragile experiment shaped by those who fought for it.” In reality, its characterizations stop at giant captions announcing names and titles (always accompanied by the same blaring musical stinger). Its “plot,” insofar as there is one, consists of people making dramatic gestures and loud speeches, devoid of any particular perspective or context.
Aronofsky, who is credited as an executive producer, has built his reputation on exquisitely crafted dramas about protagonists driven to the point of self-destruction by their obsessive ambitions. This latest endeavor, no matter the actual amount of manpower that went into it, smacks of careless indifference.
This is not artistry but content, which I mean in the most derogatory way possible. It looks passable only when it’s peeped out of the corner of your eye a split second at a time, because that’s exactly how it was designed to be consumed. (Even then, the quality is inconsistent — a noticeable drop-off in polish between the first and second chapters, which clock in at under five minutes each, makes me wonder if On This Day’s creators didn’t expect viewers to actually stick around past a curious initial look.) It is a thing generated not because anyone had anything they wanted to express but for the purpose of filling a screen, so that it might hold your eye long enough to leave an ad impression.
Or, in this case, to be the ad. Hollywood has been grappling with the encroachment of generative AI for some time now, to no small amount of protest. In the statement Thursday, Time Studios exec Ben Bitonti said On This Day offers “a glimpse at what thoughtful, creative, artist-led use of AI can look like — not replacing craft, but expanding what’s possible and allowing storytellers to go places they simply couldn’t before.” With its splashy pedigree and ostensibly meaty subject matter, it’s meant as a proof of concept to show that the technology is close to ready for prime time.
Instead, it left me wondering: “Is that it?”
Set aside the very serious fact that no matter what Bitonti says, DeepMind is very much being used here to cut out the craftspeople who otherwise would have been needed to create these sets and costumes and effects. Or the devastating environmental impacts of the technology, which you’d think an avowed environmentalist like Aronofsky (whose Postcard From Earth Sphere project, among other things, warns of the danger of ecological collapse) would be more concerned about.
Leave aside, even, that On This Day’s combination of an idealized American history and AI aesthetics echoes the “slopaganda” being issued by the White House and its allies in their project to undermine the nation’s laws and strip its people of their rights — unintentionally, perhaps, and at a more polished and genteel level, certainly, but nonetheless unavoidably.
How depressing is it that with the guidance of a visionary filmmaker like Aronofsky, with the lavish financial backing of companies like Google and Salesforce, this thing — a pair of shoddy, TikTok-length clips that would barely pass muster as animated illustrations for a high-school history lesson, let alone coherent pieces of storytelling in their own right — was the best anyone could make of the supposedly boundless limitations of AI?
On This Day has the rough shape of a creative project, but despite involving a whole team of presumably human artists, designers, editors and directors to engineer and finesse it, contains none of the touches that make a show or a movie or even an Instagram Reel worth stopping to look at. It has no distinctive personality, no artistic flourishes, no surprises whatsoever, just the pale mimicry of works created previously by artists who poured real thought and care and love into them. Without those human elements, it might as well just be another meaningless piece of data, created by a bot for other bots to process. People — real, live ones, not the rubber dolls that populate On This Day — need not get involved.
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