AI-generated Mahabharat proves one thing: storytelling still needs humans

I watched it. Or rather, I tried to. It feels like the animated version of a pitch deck. Characters look like they were assembled from leftover Midjourney prompts. The voice acting sounds like a text-to-speech generator stuck in eternal beta. The pacing, the framing, the emotional weight, it’s just not there.
If you have ever wondered what the Mahabharata would look like if it were reinterpreted by an overworked laptop and a team with no one to say “this isn’t working,” here’s your answer.

But that’s not the real issue. The real issue is that this was greenlit. Someone believed it was good enough. And no one said otherwise.

Some numbers to go with the pixels

To be fair, the launch had an impact. The show hit over 6.5 million views on day one. As of last week, it has crossed 26.5 million. There are media reports quoting “2x reach over average content” and how this is a new frontier in production efficiency.

Apparently, it cost a fraction of what traditional shows do. That’s impressive if your goal is views and savings.

But that’s not what the Mahabharata is for. This is a story that has lasted generations. It has lived in poems, puppetry, temples, street performances, comics, novels, and, more recently, high-budget TV and film. Every time it has been told, someone somewhere made a creative choice. Even when it was kitschy or loud or flawed, it still felt like someone tried. That is the minimum requirement for storytelling. This doesn’t clear it.

The story deserves better

If you really read the Mahabharata, not skimmed it, but sat with it, you would realise it’s not just an epic. It’s a catalogue of contradictions. It is filled with flawed people trying to do the right thing, failing often, and still moving forward. It is a moral conflict. Political realism. Generational trauma. Fragile egos. Strategy, manipulation, dharma, doubt. It is not clean or simple, or easy to sum up. That’s why it has lasted.

You simply cannot approach that kind of material like you are designing app banners.

In its effort to be a reinterpretation, the AI Mahabharat has become a copy-paste hallucination. And the problem is not that AI was used. The problem is that the taste wasn’t.

The tool is not the enemy

I have worked in comics, conventions, live events, and TV production. I have seen what it takes to make something from scratch. AI can help. It can assist workflows, speed up rendering, and help with iterations. I am not the enemy of tools.

But tools need editors. They need producers who care. They need writers who don’t treat characters like tokens. They need someone in the room who still knows how to say “no.” That’s what’s missing here. Not technology. Judgment.

What would make it better?

If a platform is serious about adapting the Mahabharata using AI tools, it needs to stop thinking like a hackathon. It needs to bring in actual writers. Actual researchers. Artists who understand pacing and rhythm. Animators who have studied movement. Directors who understand silence. Even with AI, this could have been beautiful.

Start small. Do a five-minute sequence. Pick one character, one dilemma. Let the tech support the story, not the other way around. Right now, it feels like the story is just a prompt someone fed into a machine so they could tweet the results.

One last thing

We like to say we are in the future now. That content is being reinvented. That everything is changing. But that change needs to serve something. If all it serves is the ability to say “first AI Mahabharata,” then what’s the point? We are at a moment where we could actually do something amazing with the right mix of tools and taste. Instead, we are burning that opportunity on things like this.

And once again, the Mahabharata will survive. It’s too big to fail. But maybe, just maybe, this is one of those moments where the rest of us should have spoken up.

Not everything needs to be made. Especially not like this. This is what happens when no one says no.

Jatin Varma is the founder of Comic Con India