A road to nowhere: On Elon Musk’s AI ‘Odyssey’

Turn on the news and the AI bubble seems set to finally burst. Reuters has reported AI stocks in China have crashed to the tune of $480bn and Google’s share price has plummeted $500bn in a panic around AI, all while Elon Musk debuts his AI-generated adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey.

The world’s richest man has been complaining about Christopher Nolan’s take on the epic for almost nine months and shows no signs of stopping following the release of a seven-minute, AI-generated short based on (part of) the classic poem. This itself comes three months after Musk swore to make a “historically accurate” adaptation of the legendary epic about a man battling sea monsters, witches, ghosts, gods, and giants, one “true to the art of Homer”, who probably didn’t exist. But I digress.

Nolan’s take on the epic does take major diversions from the poem, yes. Much like his treatment of J. Robert Oppenheimer, his primary concern is not narrative fidelity, but a mix of the ‘great man’ theories of history, the apocalypse and the Book of Genesis (especially ‘Babel’ and the ‘Fall of man’). Both The Odyssey and Oppenheimer are dissections of cultural and historical touchstones to diagnose the West’s ‘original sin’, be it Hiroshima or Troy. Where did western civilisation break from itself in pursuit of ‘The West’, a self-perpetuating myth awoken, and sustained, by blood?

There is no West – there is only violence to maintain a lie, one maintained so more violence may be enacted in its name

The movie is in part a critique of the idea that there is such thing as a ‘West’, a great cultural bulwark whose purity must be defended from the ‘Other’. There is no West – there is only violence to maintain a lie, one maintained so more violence may be enacted in its name. Electra kills Clytemnestra kills Agamemnon kills Iphigenia. Justice. Honour.

Naturally, this is not what conservatives took umbrage with.

After months spent trying to provoke a culture war around Lupita Nyong’o and Elliot Page’s casting, the movie opened to rave reviews and a handful of box-office records, and most people forgot about it within a few weeks. Not Musk. Intent on winning an argument nobody cared about anymore, and already having promised his adaptation, we now have it.

The piece itself is nothing, absence literalised

What is there to say? It’s terrible, obviously, but I don’t need to tell you that. I could pick apart any element – the incoherent geography, dull-eyed mannequins, over-enunciated, emotionless speech, complete absence of pacing or mise-en-scene, the fact that everybody moves weirdly, or is just a little too still, or the individual facial features which stay still while everything else moves in this frightening, uncanny way – I could keep going, but what would be the point? The work itself is almost ancillary. Sure, it’s uncanny and unpleasant and boring. Nobody made it, so what’s there to discuss?

The piece itself is nothing, absence literalised. Produced by nobody, containing nothing. No characters, narrative, propulsion. Pure image, absent of meaning or intent, besides simulacrum.

For sure, Nolan’s Odyssey is a flawed work: I didn’t much enjoy Robert Pattinson’s performance and found the over-editing and weirdly Christian moral centre a little grating, but these are still idiosyncratic, organic faults that could only have come from people. It melds ambitious ideas with a crowd-pleasing sensibility, and while sometimes the synthesis falters, it does so in interesting, human ways. I loved talking about it, debating its faults and successes.

That’s what the AI crowd want from art: frictionless and unthreatening, ‘content’ to be consumed individually without any threat of its contradicting their worldview or interpretation

There is nothing to say about Musk’s Odyssey, and that’s what the AI crowd want from art: frictionless and unthreatening, ‘content’ to be consumed individually without any threat of its contradicting their worldview or interpretation. It is greed, selfishness, and arrogance incarnate, conjuring an empty facsimile of art that does not exist to be shared with others or examined or even really enjoyed, but to consolidate a false world that reinforces the ‘creator’s’ pre-existing beliefs – ironically enough, exactly the kind of cyclical mythmaking Nolan’s movie criticised.

The best part of art is sharing it: making it with others, showing off your stuff, or other people’s, getting to argue about what each part represents, which character is your favourite, whether the book was better, these tiny, meaningless things that mean so much. Creation is personal, of course, but it’s sharing and arguing and surrendering to interpretation that lets the soul thrive.

This is what AI cannot do—it is only ever the literalisation of its prompt. It can never interpret emotionally or intellectually, nor be interpreted as anything other than what it is. It can never inspire disparate opinions or interpretations, because it is only ever exactly what it is. It rejects humanity completely, rejects the push-pull of author/audience and thus becomes impenetrable, obstinate, and totally hollow. It is the enabling of the conservative will to never have one’s beliefs challenged or altered, sealing oneself away in the ultimate echo chamber where everything is delivered to you personalised. One can never learn, or change, or feed one’s head.

Such is the death of the soul.