Tech billionaire Elon Musk was up in arms about the recent adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey by director Christopher Nolan, which he heavily criticised for its diverse casting and accused of lacking historical accuracy. Claiming he wanted to show that artificial intelligence could bypass traditional Hollywood studios and deliver a story “historically accurate and true to the art of Homer” at a fraction of the cost, he set his AI Grok Imagine to the task.

On October 23, the platform posted the first seven minutes.

As archaeologists and art historians, we’re not here to review the film for its artistic quality or even its historic accuracy. Instead, we’re here to point out the real problem with the whole endeavour: the promise of historical accuracy failed before the first frame was even rendered.

Contrary to what many of you might assume, as archaeologists we think Musk’s underlying idea – bringing together everything archaeology and history have to offer and using AI as a tool to explore and work with that knowledge – is a genuinely exciting one. We see considerable potential in that approach: a system spanning excavation reports and object databases might reveal patterns no single scholar can hold in mind, such as how ceramic styles spread. The problem is turning that into a film that claims to be historically accurate.

Any attempt to produce a complete,........

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