You don’t hear the defenders of so-called Western civilization talk much about The Odyssey these days.
Maybe that’s because their rabid denunciations of Christopher Nolan’s film adaptation of Homer’s epic were buried in an avalanche of money. The July blockbuster has grossed nearly $1.8 billion worldwide, silencing the right-wingers who predicted a massive flop due to diverse casting and deviations from the source material.
Perhaps the loudest of these preemptive critics was Elon Musk. The world’s richest man spared no vitriol for what he considered a desecration of the ancient Greek narrative; four days after its release, he vowed to produce a superior version. “Before this year ends,” Musk wrote on X, “Grok Imagine will make a full-length movie of The Odyssey that is historically accurate and true to the art of Homer.”
A little more than three months later—long after the discourse moved on—the public finally has a first glimpse of what we might call the Grodyssey, an Odyssey rendered through prompts fed into xAI’s video and image generation model. Rather than a “full-length movie,” it’s a seven-minute “episode” of an apparently ongoing series, depicting how Odysseus, king of Ithaca, resists a call to war against Troy but is ultimately compelled by an oath of loyalty to sail there with his army.
“Odyssey with Grok Imagine,” Musk announced Friday on X when sharing the clip, produced by AI entertainment company Wonder Studios X. The subdued post received just 18,000 likes, notably less engagement than other recent posts in which Musk cast doubt on the results of Brazil’s elections, complained about pronouns, and disparaged “legacy news.”
Grok’s introductory episode bears many hallmarks of AI slop. The movements of faces don’t match the dialog, which is further undercut by stilted and unnatural delivery. Besides Odysseus, none of the principal characters are introduced by name, and the pacing issues are laughable: The Ithacans arrive on the shores of Troy immediately after leaving their homeland, for example. Even the blue checks on X were harsh in their assessment. “Someone actually watched this and still decided to post it?” wrote one user. “Fire that person.”
But Musk’s stated goal wasn’t to deliver a better-looking or more narratively cohesive version of The Odyssey. He and his culture war comrades dubiously claimed that they were against Nolan’s casting of Black and trans actors, the Americanized English spoken by the characters they played, and various designs of ships and armor in the film because they were “historically inaccurate.” Hence Musk’s guarantee of a “historically accurate” corrective.
So, did Grok Imagine succeed on that front? Asking Grok for a self-evaluation yields an interesting answer. “No,” the chatbot says when queried about whether this Odyssey snippet is historically accurate. “Grok Imagine’s Episode 1 (and the broader promised series) is an adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey, not a historically accurate reconstruction of real events.”
The AI model further notes that the characters have no basis in the historical record, and that the poem is dominated by “myth” and “invention” rather than confirmed events. “Homeric society mixes possible Bronze Age elements (palace-centered kingdoms, certain warrior practices) with later Iron Age features,” it also states. “Many details are anachronistic or literary.”
In laying out the reasons that the episode “does not meet a strict historical standard,” Grok points out that the characters speak modern English with British accents, “not Homeric Greek or any reconstructed Bronze Age language.” Visually, it says, the production reflects “modern cinematic tropes and AI training data,” not “primary archaeological evidence.” (The bot cites the appearance of cavalry in a battle scene as an error when compared with standard reconstructions of the period.) Grok concludes that “the Odyssey itself is not a historical document, and the production makes no serious attempt at archaeological or linguistic fidelity beyond a general ‘ancient Greek epic’ aesthetic.”
Of course, the creative license that comes with adapting a millennia-old legend swarming with gods, witches, magic, and monsters was understood by just about everyone but Musk and a handful of cranks insisting that Nolan had contradicted some fundamentally true account of heroic adventure. Even Grok can tell you that its master’s fit of pique led him to promise the impossible—as he so often does.