Elon Musk Will Use AI to Make a ‘Historically Accurate’ Version of ‘The Odyssey’

Before we continue, I just need to make sure we’re all in agreement here: We know The Odyssey is fantastical fiction, right?

We know it’s a story with as much grounding in reality as, I don’t know, Lord of the Rings or Absolute Batman? It’s not even an exaggerated yarn spun about a real-life person like Billy the Kid or Davy Crockett. It’s fictional. The whole thing! The city of Troy sure existed, and there might have been a Trojan War. But we understand oral stories by nature—while they are products of a time, place, and culture—belong to everyone and no one, and flow to the whims and skill of the storyteller?

I just need to make sure we all agree before I tell you that Elon Musk wants to use AI to create a “historically accurate” interpretation of The Odyssey. Yes, really.

In yet another groan-inducing post on X, which stands upon the ruins of a once-great civilization known as Twitter, Elon Musk posted on July 21 his desire to have his artificial intelligence model Grok—and the video tool Grok Imagine—to generate a full-length film that, in his exact words, would be “historically accurate and true to the art of Homer.” He is threatening, I mean, promising to deliver this accurate Odyssey by the end of 2026.

Musk posted this as a quote-tweet (sorry, quote-post) of @HeavyPulp, an AI content account that generated a two-and-a-half-minute digest of various scenes from Homer’s The Odyssey, with Grok very obviously trained on Cecil B. DeMille films, pornography, and Acqua Di Gió by Giorgio Armani commercials.

Maybe you’re aware of the right-wing outrage around The Odyssey, the newest Christopher Nolan blockbuster. Or maybe you chose a better path and remain blissfully ignorant of how much energy people have wasted getting themselves worked up over Nolan’s creative choices. (Like how he dared to cast Lupita Nyong’o, a talented and beautiful actress, as Helen of Troy, whose total screen time in the three-hour epic is, in a generous estimate, five minutes long.)

But Elon Musk has been quintessentially Elon about The Odyssey. In between his usual dipshittery over misinformation, white discrimination and new Grok updates, Musk got his own engagement numbers up by wading into Odyssey discourse, including claiming Nolan cast Nyong’o as Helen of Troy because he “wants the awards.” (This might honestly be a compliment—Nyong’o is an Oscar-winning actress.)

Anyway, when it comes to Musk’s bootleg Odyssey, I’ll believe it when I don’t see it. Also, his deadline is the end of the year. That’s five months. Nolan shot his in three. I thought AI was supposed to make things faster?