Like many chuds online, Elon Musk has some bones to pick with the box office smash hit The Odyssey. Musk, an accomplished ancient Greek scholar who is also known for his successful cave rescues, doesn't think Odyssey director Christopher Nolan rendered a realistic version of Homer's epic. Rather than spend his billions filming something better, Musk is going to use his proprietary artificial intelligence to set things right.

The promise comes on the heels of a viral social media post on X, after a user prompted Grok to render a trailer for The Odyssey with a "correct" interpretation of the timeless classic. In practice, Grok generated a version of The Odyssey where Barstool Sports' Dave Portnoy kisses Star Wars actress Daisy Ridley.

It's unclear if Musk was actually impressed by the footage, which hacks the 24-book poem into three-second frames that hit the viewer like a seizure. Whatever the case, Musk replied to the footage by promising that "Before this year ends, Grok Imagine will make a full-length movie of The Odyssey that is historically accurate and true to the art of Homer."

This means that Musk believes that Grok, the LLM infamous for misinformation and offensive rhetoric, is capable of one-upping a multi-Oscar-winning director.

Musk's post also served as a dog whistle for all the critics online who take umbrage at Nolan's artistic choices. Curiously, many of the specific issues these online denizens focus on just so happen to relate to casting choices for Black and trans actors. The culture wars around the movie, which is one of the best-performing films of the year, have led to conspiracy theories about its success. People would rather believe ticket sales are fake than countenance that the public might just like the movie.

Anyway, academics versed in the subject will be the first to tell you that there can't truly really be a historically accurate version of The Odyssey. The epic poem is based on a vast oral tradition that began centuries before its written version (which some scholars believe to be the work of several authors). What we know today as The Odyssey is, by definition, an interpretation of the original collection of oral tales. And as Emily Wilson has proven, minor choices in translation can radically alter meaning.

Nolan's movie thus sits in a long tradition of interpretations of an ancient myth. Arguably, seeing the many ways the work has been rendered over time and across cultures, is exactly what makes The Odyssey admirable in the first place.

According to Musk's timeline, Grok has about five months to come up with something better than Christopher Nolan's movie. Funnily enough, considering how generative AI works, once Grok "makes" its own version, it will surely borrow a lot from Nolan's blockbuster movie.

Related

Christopher Nolan's latest has earned near unanimous praise from audiences and critics