Elon Musk has been in full-blown culture war mode for quite a while, and often takes that fight into unexpected corners. One of his more unusual recent crusades centered around Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster The Odyssey, the production of which he argued “desecrated Homer.”
To right this unspeakable historical tragedy, Musk launched a contest offering $100,000 to whoever could use his Grok AI to create a “historically accurate” version of the ancient Greek epic.
This is “The Odyssey” as Homer intended. My longest, most intricate work to date. I pushed @grok @imagine to its absolute limits to create this 5-minute epic.
What bothered me most about the recent adaptation was the omission of the Phaeacians and Princess Nausicaa, whom… https://t.co/awYW6Hu4W8 pic.twitter.com/hJHOgdkEec— Nem Perez (@NemPerez) August 31, 2026
It’s safe to say that while a winner of Musk’s contest has been crowned, Musk has absolutely come out the loser in this one. The winner of the contest generated yet another in a long line of rubbery-looking AI videos, and it’s also riddled with inaccuracies that clash with the source material. For instance, Polyphemus, a.k.a. the Cyclops, who rather famously has only one eye, has three eyes in the winning AI adaptation.
Conversely, Christopher Nolan just turned a 2,700-year-old story into a worldwide box office and cultural sensation, cementing its status as Universal Pictures’ highest-grossing film of all time and further cementing Nolan as one of the most important filmmakers in the 21st century.
It’s that versus a guy who put too many eyes on a f—king Cyclops. And that’s not the last of the inaccuracies. Polyphemus seems to change sizes throughout the five-minute short film. Poseidon looks like he’d be more at home advertising a predatory mobile game. Greek soldiers can be spotted wearing the armor of Roman legionnaires, and there isn’t an ounce of emotional resonance to be found, but of course being actually good wasn’t the point of any of this. The point was to create something that was more along the lines of Homer’s epic tale than Nolan’s version ever could get, and on that front, the entire project was a resounding failure.
If the winner was riddled with this many inaccuracies, I shudder to think what was going on in the losers’ videos. None of them are better than Nolan’s version unless, of course, you have extraordinarily bad taste, or have gone so all in on AI investments that if it doesn’t work out you’ll be living under a bridge for the rest of your life.
The post The Winning Film of the ‘Historically Accurate’ Odyssey Contest Is, Uh, Not Good appeared first on VICE.
