So, We Should Get Updates on Elon Musk’s “Historically Accurate,” AI-Generated Odyssey Soon, Right?

One of the things that makes our bullshit news cycle so easily and endlessly exploitable is that it weights itself toward recency and novelty so strongly that there’s little incentive to loop back and consider whether the people driving the news actually follow through on any of the grandiose promises and proclamations that get media coverage. This is of course doubly pertinent if one of the figures in question owns the social media network that BS news it blossoming on in the first place, as the world’s first/former trillionaire Elon Musk does with the site formerly known as Twitter. To zero in on a specific instance: Remember when Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey was looming on the horizon for release at the heart of summer, and the entire bigoted conservative/far right media landscape was obsessing about its casting and vowing that it would be a catastrophic box office failure? It was against that backdrop that Elon Musk stirred up headlines absolutely everywhere by claiming that Twitter’s CSAM-generating, legally imperiled chatbot Grok would produce a “historically accurate,” superior feature length version of The Odyssey by the end of 2026.

In the time since early July, Grok has gotten around to such hijinks as calling Elon Musk a pedophile and calling for his assassination, but what it hasn’t seemingly done is produce any new-and-improved feature length Odysseys. It’s almost as if Elon Musk wasn’t serious about anything other than fanning the flames of the culture war when he first made the below post. You might recall its ’70s-looking, downy soft-focus version of Odysseus speaking with Calypso, featuring styling evocative of ’70s softcore Europorn and a the brief appearance of a Greek deity that for some reason looks exactly like a Christian angel.

This clip was, I guess, supposed to sell the world on how great an AI-generated version of The Odyssey from Grok would be. Instead, it merely highlighted what most every attempt at replicating feature film aesthetics does when AI evangelists attempt to share them around in circles of people who are genuinely interested in film: It repulsed and unnerved everyone who saw it except for the AI obsessives. Even though its visual details and dialogue matching are admittedly finer than the majority of AI slop videos you’ll see floating around the wreckage of Twitter, it still reeks of uncanniness in countless other ways. There’s the static, lifeless back-and-forth framing of the conversation between Odysseus and Calypso, because AI hates dynamic camera movement. There’s the preponderance of tight close-ups and characters gazing/striding directly toward the nonexistent camera, which has always seemingly been an AI hallmark. I’ve already mentioned the distinctly gauzy lighting, a sort of Barbara Walters interview filter as applied to ancient Greece. Or the faux gravitas of the mostly formal dialogue, followed by Odysseus then ending the same conversation with “…okay.” Even the “bloopers” follow-up Musk would post weeks later somehow seems less forced, less purely unnatural.

But hey, Musk promised a full-length, Grok-generated Odyssey would be forthcoming, right? Surely he’s not just going to go quiet on the subject and move on to the next grift, right? After all, Nolan’s film has only gone on to make somewhere in the neighborhood of $1.63 billion at the box office in the time since Musk laid the gauntlet down, good for the new all-time record (by far) for an R-rated feature. It now stands at #14 on the list of the highest grossing feature films of all time, ahead of The Avengers and easily the highest tally of Nolan’s career, dollar totals that were so outlandish that they inspired an entire flotilla of new right-wing conspiracy theories alleging that every theater on Earth had agreed to coordinate on faking ticket sales numbers for the sake of Big Woke.

Logically, this all indicates there must be a huuuuuge market out there of people who were deeply dissatisfied in this telling of The Odyssey and are really hoping for a “historically accurate” version of a story from Greek mythology that begins with a fictional war, segues to fictional monsters, and ends with the return of a fictional king. Elon is probably just waiting on the contracts to be finalized with Sydney Sweeney for her voiceover of Athena before he updates us all on the progress Grok has no doubt been making on its mighty, Herculean labor.

Presumably including a historically accurate cyclops

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— Matt Novak (@paleofuture.bsky.social) 11:07 PM · Jul 21, 2026

Of course, Musk also may have simply been hoping that one of his sycophantic followers would come along and just complete that particular project for him, so he wouldn’t have to live up to his promise. A few weeks after Elon’s initial boast that an AI-generated, feature length Odyssey was coming, the official Grok account blasted out a post seeking entries for a contest to create “a compelling scene from Homer’s The Odyssey that shows what Grok @Imagine’s video and voice capabilities can do.” Is this meant to satisfy Elon’s boast, do you think? A “compelling scene,” quietly swapped in to substitute for the “full-length movie” the world’s richest man had teased?

Knowing Elon, I’d say that’s more than likely. In honor of the historically accurate, full-length AI version of the Greek classic we’ll never be receiving, then, let us enjoy some of the hand-picked goodies I’ve discovered among the deranged entries in this contest.

Perhaps you’ll be moved by this tender version, which features a crew of what appear to be clone sailors, more slow zooms than you could possibly believe would fit in three minutes, and the sounds of a massacre playing out over a black screen and the words “The End.”

Perhaps that’s a bit too treacly, or the production values are too much for you to drink in? Then please enjoy 15 seconds of pure AI slop, complete with the tiniest snippet of siren song that the coward Nolan denied us!

As far as the more ambitious entries go, I’m definitely partial to this one, which features a rather genteel version of the cyclops Polyphemus, and even more polite members of Odysseus’ crew who stand perfectly motionless and silent while the cyclops scoops them up. Very brave, very demure sailors. You know Odysseus must be a good leader, to inspire men to so readily allow themselves to be eaten alive by a giant monster.

But wait, maybe that’s not quite epic enough to suit the refined gentleman and Homeric expert. If we’re going to be rewarding someone with the grand prize, it should probably be the person who does the most shameless self-promotion in their entry, boasting that this AI-generated snippet is his “longest, most intricate work to date.” I bet it is! He goes on to promise that his version has all the hot Homer highlights that the others are missing, including “the omission of the Phaeacians and Princess Nausicaa,” which I think we can all agree is the selling point of any adaptation of The Odyssey. I know that in my own sold-out IMAX showing, I kept hearing people murmuring “Phaeacians” this and “Princess Nausicaa” that, and as we walked out the general consensus among the audience seemed to be that the three hour film was missing at least one more scene where Odysseus spoke with a woman in a darkened room.

When it comes to The Odyssey, the simple reality is that the American right wing was stomped in that particular culture war more or less like the unlucky residents of Troy waking up one night to find hordes of pillaging Greeks sacking the place. An entire wing of the MAGA influencer sphere attempted a psy-op to convince the public that Nolan’s film would be a spectacular commercial failure because it contained a black woman as Helen of Troy and a single trans person, both in roles that barely involved more than a few minutes of screen time each, and half of those same influencers then attempted to flip-flop in the wake of the film’s massive success to claim that actually, its story is a triumph of conservative values.

Against that backdrop, it only makes sense for someone like Elon Musk to conveniently forget all about his boasts of using his CSAM-generating AI chatbot to outdo a film that has now made $1.6 billion at the box office. There are new boasts to make; additional news cycles to influence, and a midterm to lose. The guy’s got a lot on his plate. A feature length AI Odyssey is one quest he might just have to abandon.

"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."

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— Mrs. Betty Bowers (@mrsbettybowers.bsky.social) 4:06 PM · Jul 22, 2026

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