It's perhaps the least surprising collaboration of 2026. Time Magazine (owned by Marc Benioff and doing stuff like this) has teamed up with Darren Aronofsky (already well known for copying the work of others) on an AI-generated web series about the American Revolution that finally answers the question nobody was asking: what if that Coke ad had muskets in it?
Aronofsky is Executive Producer on the series On This Day… 1776--presumably because slop spat out by a mutated autocorrect doesn't need a director--and the way Time describe this thing is wild:
If On This Day…1776 manages to make the American Revolution feel like something that’s actually alive, it’s likely because the project has two things going for it. One is a new technology. The arrival of the U.S.A.’s semiquincentennial coincides with advances in artificial intelligence that leave behind sepia tints and costume drama and let storytellers generate a world that feels vibrant, richly textured, and immediate.
You will not be surprised to learn that the series feels neither vibrant, richly textured or immediate. It looks like shit. Because it was made by a computer, and not a human director--even one as derivative as Aronofsky--every scene is cartoonishly ghastly. Objects and characters are unable to maintain their shape, and there are AI-generated irregularities throughout that nobody has either noticed or cared to remove.
Finally we’ll see the story of how the nation of Aamerleda was founded
— Allosaur (@allosaur.bsky.social) 2026-01-29T18:14:13.101Z
I don't want you to think you have to watch this. I'm only including it here for context, you absolutely don't have to click play on this and risk someone involved in making it using those likes to somehow justify...any of this.
What I am going recommend is one more piece of Time's absurd copy for the series, which is as unnatural and fake as the series itself:
And that immediacy lives not only on the screen. The project also takes its “of-the-moment” feel from the headlines. In the first episode, dated Jan. 1, George Washington, visiting the hillside outside Boston where irregulars hold the high ground above British forces, asks them to shout out where they’re from. (You’ve never heard “Delaware!” proclaimed with more defiant pride.) And in the second installment, Jan. 10, Ben Franklin recruits Thomas Paine to articulate the overarching principles that can unite them. “Here in America,” Common Sense declares, “the law is king.”
In the story of how the United States of America came together for the first time, On This Day…1776 has the cure for what ails us.
The defining thing about AI today isn't the slop or the copyright infringement issues we've been facing for years, it's the increasing desperation with which it's being forced on us by an elite who knows we don't want it, but knows they need us to have it anyway so they can maintain the charade that their overcommitted tech companies are making a line go up.
Even by the standards of copywriting, even by the standards of self-promotion, what Time has written here has about as much credibility and basis in reality as a White House press briefing. 1776 doesn't have the "cure for what ails us", it's just more of the same poison.
Oh, and for anyone who doesn't want to leave behind "sepia tints and costume drama", but does want to revisit the events of 1776 and watch some stuff made by humans, you should watch HBO's fantastic John Adams series if you haven't:
Or, for a more recent and comprehensive retelling, there's Ken Burns' epic series:
