A mistake we’ve all been making in our responses to the rise of AI slop is deriding it on the basis of its embarrassing mistakes and nauseating uncanniness. The reality is that the tech is improving at an astonishing rate, going from seventeen-fingered body horror images to borderline-convincing live-action film in just a couple of years. It will get better still, and all the while remain an uncreative and immoral act of plagiarism and wanton destruction of both the environment and creative jobs. So while a new AI-generated video doing the rounds showing a fake live-action trailer for a Legend of Zelda movie might still have much to mock, that’s really not the issue here. The issue is how clearly it reveals the entire gen-AI grift.
The self-named “PJ Ace,” CEO of [grits teeth] viral AI video company Genre.ai, has posted a thread to X to boast about how he was able to make a trailer for a Zelda movie in just five days, and for only $300, using a suite of AI tools within Freepik. There’s so much to unpack here, but let’s start with the video itself.
Nintendo took 40 years to give us a Legend of Zelda movie.
I made this in 5 days on a $300 budget.
It looks like a $300M blockbuster.
Let me show you how I made this in 5 simple steps inside of Freepik: 🧵 pic.twitter.com/DgkdPDPyGA
— PJ Ace (@PJaccetturo) January 6, 2026
You know, when it comes to making the most immediate criticism of the footage itself, I can’t really improve on the reaction from New York Times tech writer Mike Isaac:
incredible narrative work if your audience largely lacks object permanence https://t.co/o5FSDY4Khr
— rat king 🐀 (@MikeIsaac) January 7, 2026
Like pretty much every so-called AI film you’ll see, characters will change their appearance from shot to shot, because generative AI has no concept of what it’s generating, and so cannot compare one moment to the next. Hence, despite some moments of utterly convincing photorealism, this whole two-minute slopfest makes no coherent visual sense. I mean, go ahead and pick your favorite fake actor who shows up throughout.
Yet, as flawed as that is, this is way better than videos we were seeing just last year. These faces are at least similar (if still obviously different, from nose and mouth shape to complexion), given they’re all based on the same “reference material” (pictures of real actors who weren’t asked), and this element of the tech will also get better, fast.
And let’s not be in denial. There are moments in this clip that are really impressive given that they were entirely created by computerized plagiarism. That’s in some part due to the fact that a human put a vague amount of effort in, rather than just leaving a machine to run away with its own delusions unguided, as “Ace” lays out in his thread. It did, after all, take five days to put together, and a whole bunch of money was spent on credits to speed up the processing. There are also moments that look embarrassingly poor, the sorts of things that would see a real trailer dragged across the internet until the film’s creators promised to go back and fix things.
So, altogether it took $300, five days, three different AI tools, and one boiled ocean. And for what? No, seriously, for what?
Sloppy Drivel
I’m not going to argue this took away jobs. Pajamas Ace was never going to make this mock trailer if it involved standing up, let alone casting, lighting, make-up, set building, VFX, post-processing, editing rushes, and the huge amounts of money it would have taken to create the above without all the shitty bits. The bits like the awful-looking blood, crappy Moblin animation, that moment where Link looks like a cartoon at the end, and his apparently just shooting Ganon with a single arrow to win. Oh, and my favorite bit is when Link fires that arrow and, rather than the arrow moving, Link’s hand just explodes instead.
But of course, this is also all about the potential of destroyed jobs, of sacrificing hands-on creativity, human inspiration, improvisational talent, and tangible reality for the sake of sloppy drivel that superficially looks like cinema. You know every movie studio head is watching this garbage and having dollar signs appear in their eyes with a loud “ker-ching!” like they’re a cartoon pig, wondering how long it can be before they can do away with the pesky expenses of dolly grips, second-unit assistant directors, and most of all, those infuriating actors and directors with their heads full of ideas. This is about an existential threat to an entire industry.
Degenerative AI
Getting back to that original X post, let’s go through it line by line because it reveals so, so much about the AI-brainwormed:
“Nintendo took 40 years to give us a Legend of Zelda movie.”
Um, no, that’s not true at all. Nintendo didn’t want to make a Legend of Zelda movie until very recently, and announced this intention in 2023. Last year we received casting information, and toward the end of 2025 we saw sneak glimpses from filming. The final film is due to be released in May 2027, meaning short of any further delays, Nintendo will have taken four years to give us a Legend of Zelda movie. Let alone that it’s silly to pretend the five days to make this rubbish would be comparable to the 40 years since Zelda was created.
“I made this in 5 days on a $300 budget.”
A computer made it, with PJ rearranging AI-generated images using the likenesses of the movie’s real-world actors without permission. There wasn’t a “budget,” that was just how much he spent on tokens by the time it was done.
“It looks like a $300M blockbuster.”
It looks like an Uwe Boll movie trailer, lasting less than two minutes, with no discernible plot or character development. It in no sense, from any angle, looks like a $300 million blockbuster, and nor does it look like the trailer for one. It’s very technically impressive stuff given how dreadful gen-AI clips were a couple of years back, but that is very much it.
And it’s all part of the grift. Scour X and you’ll find thousands of examples of people’s thrown-together gen-AI “trailers,” and precisely zero 110-minute movies. (Don’t actually scour X, to be clear, because fucking hell.) This tech is only capable of creating the implication of something real and never the real thing itself. It’s a tissue-thin veneer, all promises and no delivery.
A trailer is a promise of a movie to come. A gen-AI trailer is the final product; an empty, plotless, largely incoherent collection of striking clips, edited together in a way that matches our understanding of the language of trailers, and as such is engineered to tell our brains that it’s a taster of something far larger and more significant. It’s a con, a wheeze, and it’s always the act of those invested in the gen-AI industry rather than impassioned creators with a story to tell.
These clips will get better and better, look more and more realistic, and the result will be a more convincing promise with exactly the same lack of any delivery. Our new friend PJ Ace and the legions of AI bros congratulating him in the replies on X won’t be going on to make a full-length movie using these tools, because that’s a whole different act, one born of creativity. Scanning a bunch of Zelda assets and a couple of actor’s faces, then arranging the results in the shape of something that reminds us of a trailer, is the opposite—it’s cynicism.
