Not all AI

It’s important to note that On This Day… 1776 is not fully crafted by AI. The script, for instance, was written by a team of writers overseen by Aronofsky’s longtime writing partners Ari Handel and Lucas Sussman, as noted by The Hollywood Reporter. That makes criticisms like the Guardian’s of “ChatGPT-sounding sloganeering” in the first episodes both somewhat misplaced and hilariously harsh.

Our production source says the project was always conceived as a human-written effort and that the team behind it had long been planning and researching how to tell this kind of story. “I don’t think [they] even needed that kind of help or wanted that kind of [AI-powered writing] help,” they said. “We’ve all experimented with [AI-powered] writing and the chatbots out there, and you know what kind of quality you get out of that.”

The producers also go out of their way to note that all the dialogue in the series is recorded directly by Screen Actors Guild voice actors, not by AI facsimiles. While recently negotiated union rules might have something to do with that, our production source also said the AI-generated voices the team used for temp tracks were noticeably artificial and not ready for a professional production.

Humans are also directly responsible for the music, editing, sound mixing, visual effects, and color correction for the project, according to our source. The only place the “AI-powered tools” come into play is in the video itself, which is crafted with what the announcement calls a “combination of traditional filmmaking tools and emerging AI capabilities.”

In practice, our source says, that means humans create storyboards, find visual references for locations and characters, and set up how they want shots to look. That information, along with the script, gets fed into an AI video generator that creates individual shots one at a time, to be stitched together and cleaned up by humans in traditional post-production.