Elon Musk spent months crusading against Christopher Nolan’s “woke” adaptation of “The Odyssey” before it came out, anticipating that it would bomb at the box office. When that didn’t work and the movie made over a billion dollars, he vowed that his Grok AI — best known for calling itself “MechaHitler” and generating loads of CSAM — would create a full-length version of the ancient Greek saga that would be “historically accurate and true to the art of Homer” before the end of the year.
That hasn’t happened yet. But we have gotten a different sort of AI adaptation of “The Odyssey” — though not the kind, we suspect, that Musk had in mind.
Enter this abominable AI slop parody of vice president of the United States JD Vance, who stars as the Cyclops that Odysseus and his men get trapped in an island cave with. Vance is made to look like those weird babyface edits of him, except with one gigantic eyeball, as he performs hijinks like stuffing Odysseus’s men into a couch and chugging hot dog water.
That hissing noise you hear is the sizzling of your own eyeballs, amid a conspicuous absence of laughter.
Later in the bizarre video, the Cyclops Vance gets pink eye because — and we hate we even have to type this — Odysseus passed gas into the couch cushion that he was napping on. We immediately cut to a Cyclops Pete Hegseth and Kash Patel outside the cave, who laugh at Vance’s cries of pain.
“Guess he has pink eye again,” they cackle, before chugging their bottles of whiskey.
After Odysseus and his men escape on their boat, Cyclops Vance cries for his “father” to strike them down. Then Peter Thiel, imagined as an evil mage, emerges from the storm clouds, smiting them with bolts of lightning.
It’s stupid and juvenile beyond comprehension, but not any more so than the AI slop Musk posts on a daily basis — or indeed that the Trump administration itself does, as with that infamous video of the president strafing droves of protestors with diarrhea from a fighter jet (in an augury of things to come, it turns out).
The AI culture wars goes both ways. Musk and his ilk can use AI to churn out anti-“woke” propaganda, and that same tech can be used to viciously mock them, too. The creator of the AI Odyssey, “NostromoCore” has posted hundreds of videos mocking JD Vance, with hundreds of thousands followers on social media platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook. There’s clearly an audience for this stuff.
So now you’ve borne witness to it: the mind-numbing AI amalgamations that your parents and particularly weird coworkers are rotting their brains out to. Could a Grok version of the Odyssey be next on the slop menu? We suspect that it could join the graveyard full of unfulfilled Musk promises, though for those itching for chintzy machine approximations of the classic epic, someone else is working on their own AI version of The Odyssey.