The Brutalist’s AI Controversy, Explained

The Brutalist seems poised for Oscar glory. The A24 film just picked up 10 Academy Award nominations—tied for second most of any film—including best supporting actress for Felicity Jones, best actor for Adrien Brody, best director for Brady Corbet, and a nomination for best picture. Corbet’s film, which follows Brody’s fictional architect László Tóth as he emigrates to the U.S. from Hungary after World War II, has been on an impressive award season run; earlier this month, it took home three Golden Globes, including best drama. But earlier this week, The Brutalist hit its first road block due to a controversial aspect of its production: the use of generative AI.

The brouhaha began when The Brutalist’s Oscar-nominated editor, Dávid Jancsó, gave a rather candid interview with video tech publication Red Shark News. In it, he revealed that Cortbet used Ukrainian software company Respeecher, which specializes in AI voice generating technology, to make Jones and Brody sound more authentic when they spoke Hungarian in the film. (The British Jones and the American Brody, whose mother is Hungarian, spend most of the film speaking Hungarian-accented English; their characters speak their native language only a few times.)

Jancsó, a native Hungarian speaker, said that he fed his own voice into the AI model, which was then used to help Jones and Brody’s characters nail some of the film’s trickier Hungarian dialect. “Most of their Hungarian dialogue has a part of me talking in there,” he told Red Shark News. “We were very careful about keeping their performances.

Jancsó said that even for someone with Brody’s Hungarian background, it’s not an easy language to learn. “It’s an extremely unique language,” he told Red Shark News. “We coached [Brody and Jones], and they did a fabulous job. But we also wanted to perfect it so that not even locals will spot any difference.”

There were other practical reasons for Corbet’s minimal use of AI, according to Jancsó. The Brutalist was independently financed, with a scant budget of under $10 million. Utilizing Respeecher to finesse the Hungarian dialogue allowed the creative team to speed up the film’s already lengthy 18-month post-production process. “It’s mainly just replacing letters here and there,” said Jancsó. “You can do this in ProTools yourself, but we had so much dialogue in Hungarian that we really needed to speed up the process. Otherwise, we’d still be in post.”

That’s not the only use of AI in The Brutalist, according to Red Shark News. The end of the film features renderings of László Tóth-designed blueprints and their completed buildings. The article says those were also partially AI-generated. “It is controversial in the industry to talk about AI, but it shouldn’t be,” Jancsó said in the interview. “We should be having a very open discussion about what tools AI can provide us with. There’s nothing in the film using AI that hasn’t been done before. It just makes the process a lot faster. We use AI to create these tiny little details that we didn’t have the money or the time to shoot.”

After Jancsó’s interview went viral, Corbet quickly issued a statement addressing his use of AI in the film. “Adrien and Felicity’s performances are completely their own,” said Corbet, in a statement to the press. “They worked for months with dialect coach Tanera Marshall to perfect their accents. Innovative Respeecher technology was used in Hungarian language dialogue editing only, specifically to refine certain vowels and letters for accuracy. No English language was changed. This was a manual process, done by our sound team and Respeecher in post-production. The aim was to preserve the authenticity of Adrien and Felicity’s performances in another language, not to replace or alter them and done with the utmost respect for the craft.”

Corbet is also pushing back against claims that AI was used to make the renderings of Toth’s buildings and blueprints. “[The Brutalist production designer] Judy Becker and her team did not use AI to create or render any of the buildings. All images were hand-drawn by artists. To clarify, in the memorial video featured in the background of a shot, our editorial team created pictures intentionally designed to look like poor digital renderings circa 1980.”

Despite Corbet’s protestations, a moral quandary has developed as the Oscars loom. How much generative-AI use is acceptable? For a certain faction of film twitter, the answer is 0.

“The Brutalist AI shit makes me so sad because how many times will this happen in the future where I see some beautifully crafted movie and find out it hid AI in parts just to cheap out without soul. It’s going to keep being more subtle each time and I fucking hate that,” reads a viral tweet from one account. Even some films, like A24’s Heretic, are taking a strong stance on the subject; that movie goes out of its way to inform audiences that “no generative AI was used in the making” as the credits roll.

It’s worth noting that The Brutalist is not the only film this award season to enhance a vocal performance with generative AI. Emilia Pérez, Jacques Audiard’s musical—which leads the Oscars with 13 nominations—also used Respeecher. In this case, it was to extend the vocal range of its lead actress Karla Sofía Gascón, who made history on Thursday as the first openly trans woman ever nominated for an acting Oscar. Gascón’s vocals were reportedly blended with those of the French pop star Camille, who wrote Emilia Pérez’s songs and score. Gascón, at least, is not particularly precious about her vocal performance. In an interview with Screen Rant, she said performing the songs in Emilia Pérez “were all a challenge for me, because I’m really not a singer. It’s not my thing.”

Manipulating singing is one thing. Decades ago, it was common for singing voices in film to be dubbed entirely. More recently, digitally altering vocals has become standard practice in both the film and music industries, particularly since Cher’s innovative use of autotune in her 1998 hit “Believe.” Angelina Jolie mixed in her own vocals with Maria Callas’s to portray the opera diva in Pablo Larrain’s Maria. Rami Malek won an Oscar for his performance as Freddie Mercury in Bohemian Rhapsody in 2019, which blended multiple voices together for its musical sequences.

Manipulating speech, however, is a slightly different beast. Films commonly have performers re-record or even add new dialogue during post-production, in a process known as ADR (a.k.a automatic dialogue replacement). According to Deadline, Corbet originally attempted to use ADR to fix Jones and Brody’s Hungarian dialogue. When that didn’t work, he landed on Respeecher. If we’re to believe Corbet and Jancsó, the technology was used simply to make the Hungarian sound as accurate as possible.

In an interview with the Washington Post, David Barber, president of the Motion Picture Sound Editors organization, is sympathetic to Corbet. He acknowledged the ethical dilemma faced by the rise of AI in the industry, but also called the technology a valuable tool for sound mixers and artists. “Nobody’s going to yell at the person with the nail gun because it’s a more efficient and new way of accomplishing that task,” he said. “AI being used by sound professionals … it’s just the newest set of tools that have been put in our hands. There’s no denying that it’s here, and you can’t ignore it.”

But for many others, the use of generative AI—no matter how insignificant or well-intentioned—is akin to juicing in professional sports: an unfair and unethical way to achieve better results. “i think the brutalist should in fact get an exceptional amount of shit about the AI stuff, all Industry Realities aside, because their whole fucking rollout was “film is back! this is handcrafted painstaking art!,” read another viral tweet. Given the focus on Corbet’s filmmaking—he’s been lauded for his craft, shooting his in the period-appropriate VistaVision format—even the slightest suggestion that he may have cut corners by using AI could affect his film’s Oscar chances.

Or maybe not. The prevalence of AI in Hollywood is undeniably growing. Respeecher recently cut a deal with Lucasfilm to help them use the voice of the late James Earl Jones in future Darth Vader projects, with Jones’s blessing. But as AI becomes more widely-accepted, the consequences for creatives of all types seem increasingly dire. There’s a reason protections against AI were central to the negotiations for both actors and writers during the 2023 Hollywood strikes.

“The Brutalist is a film about human complexity, and every aspect of its creation was driven by human effort, creativity, and collaboration. We are incredibly proud of our team and what they’ve accomplished here,” said Corbet at the end of his statement. Human effort, yes—but effort that was at least partially generated artificially. And for those who’d rather watch something imperfect than something flawless but slightly artificial, using AI to fix human error feels unsettling to say the least.