Grok can launch a thousand ships—but this AI remake of the 'Odyssey' can't make us feel

by Niusha Shafiabady, Theresa Dicke, The Conversation

edited by Swati Mestri, reviewed by Andrew Zinin

This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility:

Add to Preferred Sources Credit: Grok Imagine a father pretending to be insane because he wants to stay with his son and his family and not go to war. When his son's life is in danger, he is forced to disclose the truth and is obliged to leave his son to go to war.

This is a heartbreaking story, but when artificial intelligence created it, critics found it unmoving, motiveless and meaningless.

The seven-minute film introducing the story of the "Odyssey" was made by Elon Musk's Grok Imagine system and is the first episode in what is planned to be a full-length feature.

Guardian film critic Peter Bradshaw said it had an " uncanny-valley stock-footage quality." The Telegraph called it "sloppy gruesomeness," while Rolling Stone noted viewers found the acting "soulless" and "wooden."

The occasional reviewer has been slightly more muted in their criticism, finding brief visual moments that worked. TechCrunch said "a few individual shots might provide a reasonable simulacrum of reality," and in Digital Trends, Paulo Vargas wrote, "Some of the best shots don't contain actors. Ancient landscapes stretch into the distance. Close-ups of grimy hands suggest people who have touched something rougher than a keyboard. For a few seconds, the illusion holds."

But, he continues, it falls apart when "the people begin to move, and worse, they start speaking."

Why can AI create a passable landscape for a few seconds but fail to capture a full-fledged world, make characters look lifelike or tell a story that moves us?

AI systems can generate sequences of actors, ships or battlefields by calculating from learned patterns what image is likely to follow the last.

These images can be detailed. In Grok's "Odyssey," we see the sunlight reflecting off polished bronze breastplates; dry dirt clods flying behind a straining ox; the dark, windblown folds of Penelope's tunic.

But there is a difference between generating detailed images and making them look natural and believable.

A static landscape or a few seconds of a close-up might look fine. But once people start moving, AI video tools struggle to keep things consistent from one shot to the next, leaving viewers with jarring cuts and plastic-looking characters.

For a story to work, a scene must be connected to previous events and the characters must have reasons for their actions. The audience needs to understand what characters want, why they want it, what stands in their way and what could happen if they fail.

Showing a fleet of ships sailing to Troy in the distance doesn't make a film look lifelike, and it doesn't give us a reason to care about the people who are aboard the ships.

There is another challenge for AI filmmakers: making AI-generated characters express emotions naturally.

We can ask AI to make a character look sad or angry, and it can generate tears, facial expressions and gestures. But human emotions are more complicated than that.

Someone might smile while feeling nervous, remain silent when they are deeply upset or try to hide their fear. When digital characters get these facial expressions slightly wrong, our brains quickly notice and it feels eerie and unnatural.

Being human means being imperfect. AI-generated films can't capture this imperfection in the same way a human actor can.

And many memorable moments in films were unplanned. In "Good Will Hunting," Robin Williams improvised a story about his late wife farting in her sleep. Matt Damon's laughter was genuine, and the filmmakers kept the scene.

AI can produce striking visual surprises. Because generative models combine patterns in unpredictable ways, they can produce happy accidents like an eerie shaft of light cutting across a character's face, an unusually dramatic low camera angle or a startling color contrast that the prompter never asked for.

These can look like bold artistic choices on the surface. But to an algorithm, a poetic shadow and a visual glitch are both just statistical variations. It can't know if an unexpected shot enhances the heartbreak of a scene or completely ruins its mood, because it has no concept of human grief, love or dramatic tension.

Genuine, unscripted human moments make a story feel real because they come from lived experience, not mathematical probability.

Grok's "Odyssey" also suffers because we know it is AI.

We are biased against artworks when we know they are made by AI rather than humans, but we sometimes prefer AI-generated images to human-made ones when we aren't told their origin.

How we feel about art depends not only on what we see, but also on who we believe created it.

The debate about Grok's "The Odyssey" is about the essence of being human and what we value in art as the technology becomes easier and cheaper to use.

The story of Odysseus is not simply memorable because it contains battles, monsters and a wooden horse. It has survived millennia because it is a very human story we can all relate to: a story of a man struggling to return home to the people he loves.

AI can generate a shot of a thousand ships; the harder task is making us feel the cost of one goodbye.

Swati Mestri holds a bachelor's degree in Electronics Engineering and has worked as a content editor since 2019. She has experience editing research documents across technology, health care, and materials science, and has a particular interest in technology and space. Full profile →

Master's in physics with research experience. Long-time science news enthusiast. Plays key role in Science X's editorial success. Full profile →

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.