Last week, filmmaker Darren Aronofsky's AI studio Primordial Soup and Time magazine released the first two episodes of On This Day... 1776. The year-long series of short-form videos features short vignettes describing what happened on that day of the American Revolution 250 years ago, but it does so using “a variety of AI tools” to produce photorealistic scenes containing avatars of historical figures like George Washington, Thomas Paine, and Benjamin Franklin.

In announcing the series, Time Studios President Ben Bitonti said the project provides "a glimpse at what thoughtful, creative, artist-led use of AI can look like—not replacing craft but expanding what’s possible and allowing storytellers to go places they simply couldn’t before."

Outside critics were decidedly less excited about the effort. The AV Club took the introductory episodes to task for "repetitive camera movements [and] waxen characters" that make for "an ugly look at American history." CNET said that this "AI slop is ruining American history," calling the videos a "hellish broth of machine-driven AI slop and bad human choices." The Guardian lamented that the "once-lauded director of Black Swan and The Wrestler has drowned himself in AI slop," calling the series "embarrassing," "terrible," and "ugly as sin." I could go on.

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We'll debunk the myth created by Hollywood that a firearm can be completely silenced, reduced only to a "pew". I'll pull together some examples of silenced firearms and show what silencers/suppressors can and can't do, and compare the noises you'd get to some other types of sound. Then I'll go into the components which make up firearm noise: mechanical, sonic boom, and muzzle blast. Then I'll discuss the advantages that silencers bring, even though they're not as impressive as they seem in the movies. Finally, I'll sum up by discussing the limitations of silencers and why they are not universal. from Silencers: not very silent [Military Realism]