Oscar Contender 'The Brutalist' Sparks AI Controversy

Why is Oscar contender 'The Brutalist' sparking controversy for its use of AI?

"The Brutalist," considered by many to be a frontrunner for this year's Academy Awards, has been racking up more than just awards recently. The epic drama recently found itself at the center of one of the most controversial conversations in Hollywood after the film's editor and director revealed artificial intelligence was used to enhance the Hungarian spoken by the two lead actors, Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones. Following a Hungarian Jewish architect (Brody) who survived the Holocaust and immigrated to America where he struggles and strives to make a name for himself, language is at the center of "The Brutalist." It's so central that the production partnered with Ukrainian software company Respeecher to tweak and augment Brody and Jones' Hungarian to ensure they sounded like native speakers, the film's editor, Dávid Jancsó, revealed to Red Shark News. The decision to use AI has already sparked controversy around the film, raising ongoing concerns about whether the technology impacts the authenticity of an actor's performance or signals further automation of human creativity. However, Jancsó and the film's director, Brady Corbet, say AI was used with creative intent. "I am a native Hungarian speaker and I know that it is one of the most difficult languages to learn to pronounce," Jancsó said. "It's an extremely unique language. 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 was an artistic reason for doing it," says Rupal Patel, a professor of communication sciences and disorders at Northeastern. "The artistic reason was that the viewer of the movie isn't questioning the authenticity of the role of these actors in Hungarian. ... I think it's actually to be more inclusive for the Hungarian listeners and viewers." The production team tried to edit the actors' Hungarian during the traditional post-production process but found that the peculiarities of Hungarian, specifically the vowels, made it challenging. The production team then turned to Respeecher, known for its AI voice work in Hollywood, to merge Brody and Jones' performances with Hungarian spoken by native speakers, including Jancsó. The process, voice conversion, is more modification than manufacturing, Patel explains. "If you want to convert my voice to Michelle Obama's voice, I say something, she says something and we graft that one person's voice into the other," Patel says. "You're not completely removing the performance of Brody or Jones, but you're modifying it. These actors did learn to speak in Hungarian and they did take on the role. It's pretty amazing what they did." Patel says AI's application in "The Brutalist" is an evolution of more traditional voice editing in film where manual tweaks are made to add, remove or adjust the way an actor says a particular word or line. However, she acknowledges that the anxieties around AI are rooted in real concerns about the future of the technology and its potentially disruptive effect on industries like Hollywood. "The tricky thing here with AI is that it feels like it's the beginning of the end," Patel says. "It feels like today we're ok with AI just removing some of the imperfections of the accent ... [but] then, maybe over time, it will become less and less so about the artist, and the AI will do it themselves. You can discard the human. That's the big worry with AI now. Are we scaffolding ourselves out of existence?" Patel maintains that "AI is an evolution of the tools we have," but Rébecca Kleinberger, an assistant professor at Northeastern who studies the use of voice technology, says voice conversion is a much bigger technological leap than those in the past. She is unsure whether it's a leap forward, but it comes with some potential benefits. Some people are just more wired for language and accent acquisition than others, and it becomes even more difficult the older we get. For some actors, AI could be a kind of language assistant that works in tandem with traditional voice training. "Yes, maybe with a lot of training the actors could have reached a very realistic accent; it depends on the accent," Kleinberger says. "Depending on the accent, it might be easier or harder or almost impossible for some people to learn them." Kleinberger is adamant that there is inherent value to actors like Brody and Jones learning a language or accent, one that shouldn't be lost as AI becomes more widely adopted. Language, especially one as specific as Hungarian, is tied to culture, behavior and psychology in ways that are instructive for actors and moving for audiences. "It's very meaningful for their preparation and learning of the culture," Kleinberger says. "If you remove that from a movie, does that remove some of the authenticity, some of the meaningfulness of the actors' jobs themselves?"

'Brutalist' criticized for using AI to adjust Adrien Brody's accent: 'This is a disgrace'

"The Brutalist" tells the story of László Tóth (Brody), a fictional Hungarian-Jewish architect who, after surviving the Holocaust, emigrates to the United States. The artificial enhancement is used in a scene where a letter from Brody's character to his wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) is read aloud, entirely in Hungarian. Jancsó used AI tools from Respeecher - a Ukrainian software company - to enhance the dialogue. Viewers weren't pleased with the news. "Don't think its too reactionary to say this movie should lose the academy buzz it was getting," one posted on X. In response to the backlash, Corbet said in a statement to USA TODAY that the two actors' performances were "completely their own." "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," his statement read. In an interview with the video technology site Red Shark News published Jan. 11, Jancsó said it was difficult for Brody and Jones to perfect the distinct Hungarian accent. "I am a native Hungarian speaker and I know that it is one of the most difficult languages to learn to pronounce," he said. "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." Brody and Jones fed their voices into the AI software Respeecher, and Jancsó recorded his own voice as well to "finesse the tricky dialect." "Most of their Hungarian dialogue has a part of me talking in there," Jancsó added. "We were very careful about keeping their performances. It's mainly just replacing letters here and there." He clarified that filmmakers could have done the process themselves using Pro Tools, but given the sheer volume of Hungarian dialogue, they "really needed to speed up the process." Corbet's statement said Brody and Jones worked with a dialect coach for months to perfect their accents. "This was a manual process, done by our sound team and Respeecher in post-production," he said. AI was not used on any English-speaking parts, which make up the majority of the film, A24 told USA TODAY in a statement. Jancsó also shared that generative AI was used to create a "series of architectural drawings and finished buildings" to "create these tiny little details that we didn't have the money or time to shoot." When will Oscar nominees be announced?Oscar nominations delayed amid devastating LA fires Some social media users have called for "The Brutalist" to be disqualified from receiving further accolades at the BAFTAs or Oscars. On X, one user called it a "disgrace" to use AI to "not only avoid paying visual artists for their work" but to manipulate the actors' accents as well, which is "a fundamental aspect of ... acting." The objections arrive after the 2023 SAF-AFTRA strike, in which one of the central concerns was studios' use of generative AI to replicate performers' likeness, faces and voices. While the strike is over, the fight for AI protections is ongoing. But "The Brutalist" isn't the only film to enhance actors' voices this awards season. Netflix's movie musical "Emilia Perez," which took home four Golden Globes earlier this month, used AI to increase the vocal range of Karla Sofía Gascón by blending Gascón singing's with Camille, the French pop star who co-wrote the film's score. And in Angelina Jolie's Maria Callas biopic "Maria," the actress' opera vocals are blended with real recordings of the star. "Sometimes you hear one percent of Angelina's voice," director Pablo Larraín told IndieWire. "A couple of times, not very often, but it does happen, you listen to sixty percent or seventy percent of Angelina's voice." In the Red Shark News interview, Jancsó recognized that it is "controversial in the industry" to talk about AI, but believes that shouldn't be the case. "We should be having a very open discussion about what tools AI can provide us with," he said. "There's nothing in the film using AI that hasn't been done before. It just makes the process a lot faster." Every aspect of the 'The Brutalist'was "driven by human effort, creativity, and collaboration," Corbet said in his statement. "We are incredibly proud of our team and what they've accomplished here."

'The Brutalist' AI backlash, explained

Brady Corbert's The Brutalist is one of the most prominently featured films in this year's awards season, including widespread Oscar expectations of a Best Picture nod. Set in the aftermath of World War II, it tells the story of László Tóth (Adrien Brody), a fictional Hungarian-Jewish architect forced to immigrate to the United States without his family. The film's commitment to form is evident not only in its cinematic portrayal of Brutalism, the postwar period's defining architectural movement, but also in its reverence to American cinema of the time. Shot almost entirely on VistaVision (a format widely abandoned in the 1960s with the emergence of 70mm and CinemaScope), The Brutalist makes an event out of its theatrical screenings, with a 15-minute in-roll intermission splitting its colossal runtime of three hours and 34 minutes. It is perhaps this return to the cinematic spectacle of the mid-20th century that has made some view The Brutalist's use of an AI speech-enhancing software as some sort of betrayal to the craft and not as another tool available to filmmakers to enhance the impact and credibility of their storytelling. Concerns over the film industry's increasing use of AI are not unique to The Brutalist, with recent controversies including the horror Late Night With the Devil, Netflix's sci-fi anime short The Dog & The Boy, and Marvel's Secret Invasion. But what happened and how exactly did The Brutalist use AI? Speaking to RedShark News, The Brutalist editor Dávid Jancsó explained that the team used software by Ukrainian AI company Respeecher to refine Brody and co-star Felicity Jones' Hungarian pronunciation in the film. In the interview, Jancsó, himself a Hungarian speaker, talks about the difficulties of sounding native in his language. Hungarian is a Uralic language, a linguistic branch which also includes Finnish and Estonian, and some of its sounds are challenging to Anglo-Saxon speakers, even if they happen to be some of the world's most talented actors. Respeecher's voice conversion system builds a database of what a person sounds like -- their language, accent or other specific features (such as a lisp), then allowing an actor to perform their lines as the tool alters their voice. In The Brutalist's case, according to Jancsó, the AI speech enhancer was only used to substitute the sound of certain letters that the actors found challenging to pronounce. According to Jancsó, Brody and Jones were aware of the alterations, and most of the corrected pronunciation was read out by the editor himself. "Most of their Hungarian dialogue has a part of me talking in there. We were very careful about keeping their performances. It's mainly just replacing letters here and there. 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," Jancsó told the publisher. In his interview with RedShark News, Jancsó states that these alterations would have been made regardless, but that Respeecher's AI tool significantly sped up the process, saving the production time and money, which was especially important as The Brutalist was completed on a slim $10 million budget. It only takes looking into Respeecher's body of work to know that The Brutalist is far from the first film using AI tools in its post-production. Speech enhancing for Hollywood productions has been the Ukrainian company's bread and butter, and the company is credited for restoring Darth Vader's voice for the Obi-Wan Kenobi series after actor James Earl Jones retired, as well as recreating French singer Edith Piaf's voice to posthumously "narrate" her own biopic, which is still in the making. Beyond the film world, Respeecher has been using its technology to help preserve the endangered Crimean Tatar language, which faces increased repressions under Russia's occupation of Crimea. Not just used for voice corrections, however, AI was also employed to create some of Toth's architectural drawings and finished buildings featured in the Venice Biennale sequence towards the end of the film, according to Jancsó, though he doesn't specify (at the time of this article) what AI tool was used and whether the drawings were completely AI-generated. "It is controversial in the industry to talk about AI, but it shouldn't be," the editor told RedShark News. "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." There have been growing concerns about the use of generative AI at the expense of filmmakers, from screenwriting to acting to music production. It was one of the main instigating topics of the 2023 Writers Guild of America (WGA) and Screen Actors Guild - American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) strikes in 2023. After months of negotiations, the strikers reached tentative agreements which aim to regulate the use of AI in the film industry. Whether or not these revelations will affect The Brutalist's Oscar standing remains to be seen -- the nominees will be announced on Thursday, Jan. 23. But they've ignited a fresh conversation around the use of AI in movie and TV production, whether the production team was ready to find themselves within it or not.

'The Brutalist' used AI to tweak dialogue. Is that a big deal?

In the wake of controversy surrounding its use of artificial intelligence, the Brady Corbet film landed 10 Oscar nominations. The team behind "The Brutalist" can breathe a sigh of relief. Brady Corbet's 215-minute epic about a Hungarian architect who leaves postwar Europe to rebuild his life in America courted controversy this week over its use of artificial intelligence. But on Thursday the film landed 10 Oscar nominations, blunting the criticism. This month, "The Brutalist" editor David Jancso revealed that the production had turned to Respeecher, an AI voice-generating technology, to perfect the Hungarian dialogue spoken by the character Laszlo Toth (played by Adrien Brody, an American) and his wife, Erzsebet (Felicity Jones, who is British). "I am a native Hungarian speaker, and I know that it is one of the most difficult languages to learn to pronounce," Jancso said, explaining that he and the actors fed their voices into the technology, which used his recorded pronunciation to correct certain letters and vowel sounds. Skip to end of carousel The Style section Style is The Washington Post's place for news from the front lines of culture -- arts, media, politics, trends and fashion. For more Style stories, click here. To subscribe to the Style Memo newsletter, click here. End of carousel Jancso's comments were published on the tech website RedShark News about a week after Brody won a Golden Globe for his performance in "The Brutalist," sparking questions of whether he deserved a trophy for an AI-aided project. On Thursday, Brody was nominated for an Oscar for best actor, as was Jones in the supporting actress category. Corbet, who received nods for best director and original screenplay, defended the use of AI, emphasizing that Respeecher was used by the sound team only to ensure that the Hungarian dialogue was as accurate as possible. Brody and Jones's characters speak in accented English for most of the film. "Adrien and Felicity's performances are completely their own," Corbet said in a statement Monday. "They worked for months with dialect coach Tanera Marshall to perfect their accent. ... 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 also denied a claim that AI had been used to generate architectural drawings and structures in Toth's style at the end of the film. Production designer Judy Becker and her team, he said, "did not use AI to create or render any of the buildings. All images were hand-drawn by artists." (Becker and Jancso were nominated for production design and editing, respectively. With 10 Oscar nominations, "The Brutalist" tied "Wicked" for the most of any film after "Emilia Pérez," which got 13.) Respeecher, a Ukrainian software company, advertises itself as a "reliable AI voice partner that delivers amazing authentic voices across industries." It has been used by major Hollywood players such as Lucasfilm and Blumhouse, and was even employed by another best-picture nominee: The musical "Emilia Pérez" used Respeecher to extend best actress nominee Karla Sofía Gascón's vocal range. There are other ways to accomplish voice alterations. It is common practice for sound editors to replace a muddled word here or a pronunciation error there with recorded sounds from elsewhere on the track, said David Barber, president of the Motion Picture Sound Editors organization. Actors can also be called into a recording studio to re-perform lines of dialogue that are then integrated back into the original audio -- a practice known as automated dialogue replacement, or ADR. "We've been creating the illusion of a smooth dialogue track since the beginning of movies," Barber said. "Our job in audio and postproduction is to make our work invisible." In his comments, Jancso noted that the team turned to Respeecher after the actors failed to nail certain Hungarian sounds in the ADR process. "It's mainly just replacing letters here and there," the editor said. "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." AI is a sensitive topic in Hollywood, where labor unions have gone on strike in part to protect members against overreliance on such technology. In 2023, the Screen Actors Guild and the Writers Guild of America both fought for overarching protections, winning some -- such as a consent requirement declaring that the estates of deceased actors must agree to their image being used in new works. On the audio side of things, Barber likes to think of AI as a tool rather than a replacement. "There are many ethical questions about generative AI that are unanswered," he said, but the technology remains "a tool that's valuable ... in the hands of sound craftspeople and sound artists." "AI has logic but no judgment," he continued. "It's the difference between knowledge and wisdom. Judgment creates the art that moves people. AI can mimic something, but it won't craft it." This resonates with the points used by unions to bargain for protections against AI. Members of SAG also retain the right to "safe storage and protection of digital replications of a performer's voice, likeness and performance," according to the union's website, which specifies that actors have the right to consent (or not) to the creation of a digital reproduction and can negotiate limits on its use. In his statement, Corbet doubled down on his argument that "The Brutalist" is "a film about human complexity, and every aspect of its creation was driven by human effort, creativity, and collaboration." The Oscar nominations seem to endorse this sentiment (though the voting period for nominations ended Jan. 17, a few days before the controversy erupted). Barber likens the conversation about AI to a scenario that even Toth, the fictional architect of "The Brutalist," would understand. Imagine you are working on a building's roof, using a hammer and nail to attach the shingles, Barber said. Then, someone comes along to help using a nail gun. "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."

'The Brutalist' sparks controversy after film's editor reveals use of AI

"The Brutalist" is expected to be a frontrunner in the Oscar race, which kicks off Thursday when the nominees are announced. Days before the Oscar race officially kicks off, one of the expected frontrunners sparked controversy when the film's editor admitted using AI to enhance Hungarian accents in "The Brutalist." Director Brady Corbet's post-World War II epic stars Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones and follows an architect who survives the war and escapes Europe to America to rebuild his life. Controversy began stirring over the weekend after editor Dávid Jancsó shared in an interview with tech magazine Red Shark News that AI was used to enhance the Hungarian accents of the lead actors. The debate over the use of the technology is heating up just ahead of Thursday's announcements of the Academy Award nominations, leading some to question whether "The Brutalist" should be considered for some of the biggest awards. The film is fresh off a host of big wins at the Golden Globes, including best picture, drama. Jancsó said that the film's production utilized Ukrainian software company Respeecher to enhance Brody's and Jones' Hungarian accents when they are speaking Hungarian. The AI technology was not used to enhance the English language dialogue, which is used in most of the film, the filmmakers said. "I am a native Hungarian speaker and I know that it is one of the most difficult languages to learn to pronounce," Jancsó told Red Shark News. "It's an extremely unique language. 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." Certain sounds and letters in Hungarian are hard to speak, according to Jancsó. He said the filmmakers first tried to "ADR these harder elements with the actors." (ADR, or Automated Dialogue Replacement, is a post-production process used to re-record dialogue.) When that didn't work, Jancsó said the team "tried to ADR them completely with other actors but that just didn't work." "So we looked for other options of how to enhance it," Jancsó told Red Shark News. Brody and Jones recorded their voices with the AI software, as did Jancsó, who said "Most of their Hungarian dialogue has a part of me talking in there." "We were very careful about keeping their performances. It's mainly just replacing letters here and there," Jancsó said. The editor said AI was also used at the end of the film to create "a series of architectural drawings and finished buildings in the style of" Brody's character. "It is controversial in the industry to talk about AI, but it shouldn't be," Jancsó said. "There's nothing in the film using AI that hasn't been done before. It just makes the process a lot faster." In response to the online discussion over the AI usage in the film, Corbet, who nabbed a Golden Globe for best director for "The Brutalist," said his lead actors' performances are "completely their own" and that they worked "for months" with a dialect coach to perfect their Hungarian 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," Corbet said in a statement. "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 said that AI was not used to create or render any of the buildings seen in the film, and that all images seen are hand-drawn. "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," Corbet added. "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," Corbet said. Brody and Jones did not respond to requests for comment Monday. When asked if Jancsó had further comment, representatives for the movie pointed to Corbet's statement. "The Brutalist" isn't the only Oscar frontrunner to employ AI. "Emilia Perez," a musical about a Mexican cartel boss who transitions into a woman that also won big at the Golden Globes, also used Respeecher, the software company said in a post on Facebook. It wasn't clear from the Facebook post exactly how Respeecher was used in "Emilia Perez." The use of AI in Hollywood films isn't completely new, but the technology has caused a sense of whiplash in the wake of the dual 2023 writers and actors strikes. AI was a sticking point during negotiations between the respective unions and studios, with creatives seeking assurances that their work would not be replaced by the technology. As Hollywood continues to try and return to normalcy following the strikes that went on for months, many remain concerned that the industry has not, and may not fully rebound. Last year, two AI-related deals made by two Hollywood companies also drew scrutiny from people online who expressed concern about the repercussions. In September, the studio Lionsgate, behind franchises such as the "Hunger Games," said it would allow filmmakers to "augment" their work with AI in an effort to save money, Variety reported at the time, prompting online disappointment from people who questioned what this would mean for filmmakers. In October, Blumhouse Productions garnered backlash online after it announced it had partnered with Meta to make short films using the company's AI tools. Blumhouse founder and CEO Jason Blum defended the move, saying his company "enables artists" and that "artists always come first." "Artists want tools. And to me, it would be irresponsible if we didn't at least know about the tools, and I think, also for me, it would be irresponsible to not learn about the tools," said in a statement. Blum added: "I know nothing about AI, but I wanted to do this to learn about it." He said he wanted to enlist this partnership so when filmmakers come to him in the future to ask about using AI, he can at least have a "reasonable answer." "It's here to stay. So I want to understand it and I don't understand it yet," Blum said.

AI voice technology used in The Brutalist is nothing new - the backlash is about transparency

Director Brady Corbet's stunning new film, The Brutalist, has won three Golden Globes and remains a frontrunner for this year's Oscars despite a controversy over its use of AI which erupted this week. (The film has received 10 Oscar nominations, including best film, best director and best actor.) The growing backlash centres on whether the film should have used AI to improve the Hungarian accents of its stars, Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones. Many of today's actors are superb at delivering accents - like American Renée Zellweger's perfect English in Bridget Jones, or British actor Idris Elba's Baltimore accent in The Wire or Australian Margot Robbie's utterly convincing American accent in Barbie. For The Brutalist, the accent challenge faced by Brody and Jones was truly brutal: the tricky vowel sounds of the Hungarian language. It was even difficult for Brody, whose mother was a Hungarian refugee who arrived in the US in 1956. Looking for something good? Cut through the noise with a carefully curated selection of the latest releases, live events and exhibitions, straight to your inbox every fortnight, on Fridays. Sign up here. Brody's character is László Tóth (roughly pronounced Laslo Tort), a Hungarian-Jewish architect who emigrates to the US after the Holocaust. Jones plays his wife, Erzsébet (roughly Air-zhay-bet), trapped back in Europe. During the film's post-production, the Budapest-born editor, Dávid Jancsó (pronounced Daavid Yancho), was looking for accent perfection. So he reached for an AI tool that could make Brody's and Jones's accents sound convincingly Hungarian. The controversy over this decision is surprising because it's nothing new. I have been researching the creative use of AI in filmmaking for the past six years. Recently, the biggest progress has been in voice AI. Voice cloning technology has been misused, causing outrage over unlicensed vocal replicas of Jennifer Aniston, Scarlett Johansson and David Attenborough. But The Brutalist made just tiny alterations to two actors' voices - and with consent - which in comparison is hardly shocking. My research has involved interviews with Alex Serdiuk, CEO of the voice cloning company, Respeecher, which worked on The Brutalist. Two years ago, Serdiuk told me about the accent tools that they were developing. He is Ukrainian but speaks superb English in his native accent. Listening to my voice, he said that with Respeecher's new AI tool, "we basically can make you speak with my accent. I would be your accent donor". The technology could even help out US actors working on a British production who lack Renée Zellweger's accent skills: "We can just take their performance speaking American English and apply a Royal British accent on top of it," says Serdiuk. This was the AI tool that Dávid Jancsó used on The Brutalist, taking his own Hungarian vowels and consonants and applying them to Brody and Jones. Respeecher has been working with Hollywood for years. For The Mandalorian in 2020, the company used AI to create the more youthful voice of Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill was 68 at the time of shooting). In last year's Robbie Williams biopic, Better Man, (directed by Michael Gracey), Respeecher helped create Williams' voice for his CGI chimp avatar. So what is the problem with The Brutalist? The big issue here is transparency. No one likes to feel deceived and this backlash is emerging after American viewers saw the film without knowing. We learned the lessons of transparency back in 2021 with the documentary, Roadrunner, a film about the celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain who died in 2018. Oscar-winning director Morgan Neville used voice cloning and did not tell anyone about it - until his audience worked out that a sequence where Bourdain reads his own email couldn't have happened. Viewers felt deceived (Neville told critics that there were other moments in the film where he also did it, but wouldn't say where). Dávid Jancsó's use of AI in The Brutalist is tiny in comparison, but the reaction it has provoked is once again down to the audience being kept in the dark. Transparency is of paramount importance in generative AI. The technology can deceive us so easily that public confidence is only possible with full disclosure. The principle is part of the UK government's current consultation on copyright and artificial intelligence. Martin Adams is co-founder of MetaphysicAI, the company that did the deepfake ageing and de-ageing of Tom Hanks and Robin Wright for the recent movie Here. In a hearing last month, he told parliament's Culture, Media and Sport Committee: "We should have pre-, during and post-disclosure. That will give audiences the trust and transparency that means AI can be used for the right things and we do not get whipped up and talk about misleading people." In parallel, there is another trend developing: full disclosure that AI has not been used in a film's production. Scott Beck and Bryan Woods are the directors of the recent Hugh Grant psychological horror, Heretic. They decided to put a statement in the film's credits: "No generative AI was used in the making of this film". The filmmakers are part of a forceful negative response to AI in their industry. Woods is furious at the increasing use of the technology, saying: "I think this idea that an algorithm can just scrape all of human history and art off the internet, repackage it, regurgitate it, spit it out and somebody else can use that to create profit ... I don't know why that's legal." His statement demonstrates the emotions aroused by AI in the film business. It is this intensity of reaction that might pull the wheels off Brady Corbet's Oscar hopes. The controversy is certainly making the competitors of The Brutalist happy. But delicate use of voice AI in post-production is not what created Adrien Brody's superb performance, meriting a Golden Globe and perhaps yet an Academy Award. Nor should it detract from the creative achievements of the many human talents involved in creating this extraordinary film.

The Use of AI in 'The Brutalist' Has Moved Fans to Brand it a 'Disgrace'

The Brutalist is coming under criticism for employing artificial intelligence to fill in language gaps and generate a series of architectural blueprints. In an interview with Red Shark, the film's editor Dávid Janscó revealed that in a two-minute segment of the movie, the team used AI voice cloning software Respeecher so Brody could read a letter in perfect Hungarian. "I am a native Hungarian speaker and I know that it is one of the most difficult languages to learn to pronounce," Janscó tells Red Shark. "Even with Adrien's Hungarian background, it's not that simple. It's an extremely unique language. We coached [Brody and Felicity Jones] and they did a fabulous job but we also wanted to perfect it so that not even locals will spot any difference." Janscó says that the AI was used to enhance specific letter sounds. "If you're coming from the Anglo-Saxon world certain sounds can be particularly hard to grasp," he adds. The Brutalist, which is being tipped for Oscar nominations, stars Adrien Brody who plays Hungarian Jewish architect Lászlo Tóth, a Holocaust survivor looking to rebuild his life in the United States. The film's running time is a whopping 215 minutes and it is shot on VistaVision; a higher resolution, widescreen variant of 35mm motion picture film. The revelation that AI has been used in the movie has prompted outrage from some quarters which accuse the film of telling a story about a struggling artist while using a technology that takes artists' work without permission. Some fans branded the move a "disgrace." The furore prompted the film's director Brady Corbet to issue a statement to Deadline. "Adrien and Felicity's performances are completely their own. 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." "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." Deadline notes that Rami Malek's portrayal of Freddie Mercury in Bohemian Rhapsody -- a performance he won an Oscar for -- heavily relied on automatic dialogue replacement (ADR). In fact, none of Malek's singing came from his own vocal chords. And there are reports that another film tipped for Oscar glory, Emilia Perez, also used the same Respeecher technology to enhance the singing voice of Karla Sofía Gascón.

'The Brutalist' Editor Admits Filmmakers Used AI to Tweek Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones' Hungarian Dialogue

Brady Corbet's award contender The Brutalist is coming under fire online after the film's editor admitted in an interview some AI was used to enhance the performance of the film's leads, Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones. In an interview with video tech publication Red Shark News, editor Dávid Jancsó said the filmmakers used AI tools from Ukrainian specialist Respeecher to tweak Brody's and Jones' Hungarian dialogue in the film to make it sound more authentic. "I am a native Hungarian speaker and I know that it is one of the most difficult languages to learn to pronounce," Jancsó says in the piece. "If you're coming from the Anglo-Saxon world certain sounds can be particularly hard to grasp." Critics have applauded both Brody and Jones for their performances in the film, in which they play Hungarian refugees who emigrate to the U.S. after World War II. Brody's starring turn won the Golden Globe for best actor in a drama and he is considered a front-runner for this year's Oscars. Much of the film's dialogue is in Hungarian and Jancsó says it was important to make it as accurate to native speakers as possible. Jancsó praises Brody's and Jones' performance but says small tweaks were needed to enhance specific Hungarian vocal sounds. Initially, the filmmakers tried to re-record these elements in post. "We first tried to ADR these harder elements with the actors. Then we tried to ADR them completely with other actors but that just didn't work. So we looked for other options of how to enhance it," he says. Under tight budget constraints -- the entire budget for The Brutalist was less than $10 million -- the filmmakers used technology from Ukrainian AI startup Respeecher to finesse the delivery. Jancsó says Brady and Jones recorded their own voices for the AI and that he fed his own native Hungarian delivery into the system as a model. "We were very careful about keeping their performances. It's mainly just replacing letters here and there," says Jancsó, who describes the process as closer to dialog editing than anything creative. "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." Jancsó says Generative AI was also used for a sequence at the end of the film, as part of the inspiration for a series of architectural drawings and finished buildings supposedly designed by Brody's character, the fictional architect László Tóth. The designs themselves were hand-drawn. "It is controversial in the industry to talk about AI, but it shouldn't be," Jancsó tells Red Shark. "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." But the news has sparked online outrage, with many condemning the use of AI in the film and suggesting it should disqualify it for awards consideration. "My take on The Brutalist AI thing is it's a slippery slope to award Adrien Brody knowing his accent was edited with AI," noted one user on X. "IMO altering a performance with AI like that should automatically disqualify someone from these awards shows." "I saw The Brutalist on 35mm film and was utterly taken aback by how beautiful the movie was," noted another. "Learning that ai was used not just to enhance Adrien Drody's accent but to design buildings in the movie is absolutely pathetic." Others argued that it would be unfair to reduce the actors' performances to a few vowel pronunciations. "On one hand, it slightly diminishes the detailing, but I can't say the accent was a deciding factor in [Brody's] performance's resonance," noted one user on X. "I wasn't moved by the accent; I was moved by how he conveyed emotion." Ukrainian company Respeecher has been at the cutting edge of audio AI for several years now. The company made headlines -- and sparked controversy in some quarters -- after they did a deal with Lucasfilm to use the iconic voice of the late James Earl Jones for future Darth Vader projects. Jones had authorized the use of his voice recordings in this manner. The company also worked with Lucasfilm to create a younger version of Mark Hamill's voice for a Luke Skywalker cameo in the final episode of the second season of The Mandalorian.

Director Admits "The Brutalist" Used AI to Alter Characters' Accents

"The Brutalist" director Brady Corbet has confirmed that his critically acclaimed historical drama used AI in post-production to clean up Adrien Brody's and Felicity Jones' Hungarian accents -- though he insists it didn't impact the authenticity of their performances. "Adrien and Felicity's performances are completely their own. They worked for months with dialect coach Tanera Marshall to perfect their accents," the American filmmaker and actor told Deadline in a statement. "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." Corbet also confirmed claims that generative AI was used to help "conjure" architectural drawings shown in the coda of the film, but emphasized that the final images were human-made. "All images were hand-drawn by artists," Corbet said, with the ones in question "intentionally designed to look like poor digital renderings" of their era. The ambitious 215 minute-long epic follows a fictional Jewish Hungarian man named László Tóth (Brody), who emigrates to the US after being separated from his family and surviving the Holocaust. An acclaimed architect in Europe, Tóth lives in poverty and remains unrecognized in the New World until he's re-discovered by an American businessman, played by Guy Pearce, who makes Tóth a lucrative job offer. The controversy surrounding the film kicked off last week after an interview with editor Dávid Jancsó was released by Red Shark News. Jancsó said that the production turned to software called Respeecher to clean up Brody and Jones' dialog after the ADR stage -- a process in which certain lines of dialogue are re-recorded in post -- didn't pan out, a decision that both leads were fully on board with, Jancsó said. A native speaker, Jancsó fed his own speech into the tool to help refine the Hungarian delivery. He argued that using Respeecher simply sped up something they could have done manually. "It's mainly just replacing letters here and there," he told Red Shark. "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." Jancsó also revealed generative AI's use in "conjuring" architectural drawings, but was vague on the extent of the tech's involvement. We find clarification in a Filmmaker Magazine article from 2022, in which Corbet's production designer Judy Becker says that movie's architecture consultant used Midjourney "to create three Brutalist buildings quite quickly" as mockups to be redrawn by a human illustrator. It's worth noting that "The Brutalist" is considered one of the favorites to clean up this awards season, so the timing of these revelations is a little suspect. Nonetheless, they've now been confirmed -- albeit a little downplayed -- by the director himself. We should also note that the film has been lauded for being made on just a $10 million budget. Many framed it as providing a sustainable model for the moribund low to mid-budget mode of filmmaking. That model may become less appealing to artists after learning about AI tools' involvement, however minor. But perhaps the writing has been on the wall. Many films, from indie horror flicks to huge blockbusters like "Alien: Romulus," have admitted to using AI in some shape or form. And though each has received significant backlash, it's hard to say that it's hurt their success.

'The Brutalist' Editor Admits Filmmakers Used AI to Enhance Adrian Brody and Felicity Jones' Hungarian Dialogue

Int'l Film Community Pays Tribute to David Lynch, Lauds "Unique and Visionary Artist" Brady Corbet's award contender The Brutalist is coming under fire online after the film's editor admitted in an interview some AI was used to enhance the performance of the film's leads, Adrian Brody and Felicity Jones. In an interview with video tech publication Red Shark News, editor Dávid Jancsó said the filmmakers used AI tools from Ukrainian specialist Respeecher to tweak the Brody's and Jones' Hungarian dialogue in the film to make it sound more authentic. "I am a native Hungarian speaker and I know that it is one of the most difficult languages to learn to pronounce," Jancsó says in the piece. "If you're coming from the Anglo-Saxon world certain sounds can be particularly hard to grasp." Critics have applauded both Brody and Jones for their performances in the film, in which they play Hungarian refugees who emigrate to the U.S. after World War II. Brody's starring turn won the Golden Globe for best actor in a drama and he is considered a front-runner for this year's Oscars. Much of the film's dialogue is in Hungarian and Jancsó says it was important to make it as accurate to native speakers as possible. Jancsó praises Brody's and Jones' performance but says small tweaks were needed to enhance specific Hungarian vocal sounds. Initially, the filmmakers tried to re-record these elements in post. "We first tried to ADR these harder elements with the actors. Then we tried to ADR them completely with other actors but that just didn't work. So we looked for other options of how to enhance it," he says. Under tight budget constraints -- the entire budget for The Brutalist was less than $10 million -- the filmmakers used technology from Ukrainian AI startup Respeecher to finesse the delivery. Jancsó says Brady and Jones recorded their own voices for the AI and that he fed his own native Hungarian delivery into the system as a model. "Most of their Hungarian dialogue has a part of me talking in there," says Jancsó. "We were very careful about keeping their performances. It's mainly just replacing letters here and there. 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." Jancsó says Generative AI was also used in a sequence at the end of the film, to create a series of architectural drawings and finished buildings supposedly designed by Brody's character, the fictional architect László Tóth. "It is controversial in the industry to talk about AI, but it shouldn't be," Jancsó tells Red Shark. "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." But the news has sparked online outrage, with many condemning the use of AI in the film and suggesting it should disqualify it for awards consideration. "My take on The Brutalist AI thing is it's a slippery slope to award Adrian Brody knowing his accent was edited with AI," noted one user on X. "IMO altering a performance with AI like that should automatically disqualify someone from these awards shows." "I saw The Brutalist on 35mm film and was utterly taken aback by how beautiful the movie was," noted another. "Learning that ai was used not just to enhance Adrien Drody's accent but to design buildings in the movie is absolutely pathetic." Others argued that it would be unfair to reduce the actors' performances to a few vowel pronunciations. "On one hand, it slightly diminishes the detailing, but I can't say the accent was a deciding factor in [Brody's] performance's resonance," noted one user on X. "I wasn't moved by the accent; I was moved by how he conveyed emotion." Ukrainian company Respeecher has been at the cutting edge of audio AI for several years now. The company made headlines -- and sparked controversy in some quarters -- after they did a deal with Lucasfilm to use the iconic voice of the late James Earl Jones for future Darth Vader projects. Jones had authorized the use of his voice recordings in this manner. The company also worked with Lucasfilm to create a younger version of Mark Hamill's voice for a Luke Skywalker cameo in the final episode of the second season of The Mandalorian.

When does an actor stop, and AI begin? What 'The Brutalist' and 'Emilia Pérez' tell us about AI in Hollywood

"The Brutalist" has drawn attention this week for its use of artificial intelligence (AI) to refine some of the actors' dialogue. "Emilia Pérez," a musical crime comedy, also used AI to extend lead star Karla Sofía Gascón's vocal range. Her singing voice was blended with that of French popstar Camille, who co-wrote the film. Earlier this month, Adrien Brody won the Golden Globe for best male actor for "The Brutalist" for his portrayal of the fictional Hungarian-Jewish Holocaust survivor László Tóth. He is a favorite to win the award at the Oscars, and "Emilia Pérez" is also a strong contender this awards season. But should actors be eligible for awards if AI was used to refine a performance? Can AI make 'perfect' possible? "The Brutalist" editor, Dávid Jancsó, was the first to discuss the film's use of AI. A native Hungarian speaker, Jancsó wanted the Hungarian language dialogue to sound flawless, "so that not even locals will spot any difference." Director Brady Corbet has been quick to clarify exactly how AI was used, emphasizing the performances of Brody and his co-star Felicity Jones are their own. In a statement, Corbet explained an AI tool from Ukrainian software company Respeecher was used only to edit the Hungarian language dialogue, "specifically to refine certain vowels and letters for accuracy." Corbet insists Brody's and Jones' performances in "The Brutalist" haven't been replaced. Instead, they consented to a process of their voices being merged with dialogue recorded by Jancsó to ensure accurate Hungarian pronunciation. Their English dialogue remains untouched. For "Emilia Pérez," the film's re-recording mixer Cyril Holtz said the process of extending Gascón's range required collaboration from multiple artists. AI in the film and television industry was a major concern of the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike -- and the fight for protections in the industry is far from over. While the use of AI here may be limited to refining language portrayal, or extending a singer's vocal range, it raises broader questions: what level of authenticity and accuracy are we comfortable with? If AI makes "perfect" possible, are we setting "perfect" as the new standard? The role of the accent coach Brody and Jones worked with accent coach Tanera Marshall to hone their Hungarian accents for "The Brutalist." This accent is used in their English dialogue, which comprises the majority of the film. As a voice and accent coach, my work involves training and supporting an actor's voice to meet the demands of performance spaces, character and script. This includes building stamina for healthy, sustainable vocal use and equipping actors with skills to learn different accents. By working with an accent coach, actors develop a dexterity key for mastering new accents and sustaining them throughout a performance. Voice and accent work is central to a transformation into a character. Accents aren't merely about modifying vowels and consonants. They involve rhythm, intonation, melody, and resonance. These elements inform and are informed by the life of the character. For Brody and Jones, learning a Hungarian accent would have been integral to their process. The accent is inseparable from the portrayal of their characters. It's standard practice for actors to re-record some dialogue in automated dialogue replacement (ADR) during post-production. This can address background noise, minor script changes or accent slips. The accent coach typically accompanies the actor in the sound studio to ensure consistency. However, according to Jancsó, even ADR wasn't enough to perfect the Hungarian dialogue in "The Brutalist." That's when AI was introduced. Accents are expressions of cultural identity, conveying as much about a character as their appearance. There is always a degree of variance as the actor makes the accent and performance their own. That's part of creating a believable performance. Unfortunately, filmmakers sometimes overlook the importance of accurate accent portrayal, opting instead for what they perceive as more universally accessible or commercially viable accents, or prioritizing other elements of production like pacing or visual effects over linguistic precision. The commitment of "The Brutalist" to linguistic precision is commendable. But are we comfortable with AI being the solution? And the award goes to ... AI? The editing process revealed by "The Brutalist" and "Emilia Pérez" may be more common than we realize. Rami Malek's singing as Freddie Mercury in the biopic Bohemian Rhapsody (2018) was a mix of Queen master tapes, recordings by Canadian Christian rock singer Marc Martel (known for sounding like Mercury) and Malek's voice. Malek still won the best actor Oscar for his performance, even though the vocals were a blend. They were just one element of Bohemian Rhapsody, in the same way the Hungarian dialogue is just one aspect of "The Brutalist." In September 2024, Screen Australia released key principles to guide its approach to AI, prioritizing human talent, transparency, ethical design, diversity, equity and inclusion, fairness and responsibility. Much like these guidelines suggest, in "The Brutalist" and "Emilia Pérez," the actors gave their consent, their talent was prioritized, and the filmmakers were transparent about the process. There's even an argument that dedication to accurate Hungarian representation in "The Brutalist" promotes inclusivity for an underrepresented language in Hollywood. But it's a slippery slope. When does refining turn into creating an entire voice through AI? And if accents and vocal ranges become easily modifiable, how long before actors themselves are at risk of redundancy? "The Brutalist" is an exploration of complex themes around artistic integrity. Ironically, it may lean on technology that risks undermining the authenticity it strives to achieve. This paradox is worth reflecting on. In perfecting the portrayal of the human experience, are we losing some of its essence?

Oscars frontrunner The Brutalist uses generative AI, and it might cost it the Best Picture prize

The Brutalist, one of the Oscars frontrunners with nine BAFTA 2025 nominations, could have faltered its chance at the biggest prize of them all after the film's editor revealed the use of generative AI to make the movie feel more authentic. The movie, which is expected to earn many Academy Award nominations when they are revealed later this week, tells the story of László Tóth (Adrien Brody), a Hungarian Jewish architect who survives the Holocaust and moves across the Atlantic to chase the American Dream. Brody's mother is Hungarian, while his father is of Polish Jewish descent, and the actor himself has spoken about how he sees his own immigrant grandparent's struggles in the character he portrays. While Brody's excellent performance is expected to receive a Best Actor nomination, having already won Best Actor in a Drama at the Golden Globes earlier this month, his performance and other aspects of The Brutalist are now coming under intense scrutiny. Speaking to RedShark News, The Brutalist's editor Dávid Jancsó revealed that generative AI was used to improve Hungarian pronunciations as a large majority of the movie's dialogue is in Hungarian. Jancsó said: "I am a native Hungarian speaker and I know that it is one of the most difficult languages to learn to pronounce. Even with Adrien's Hungarian background it's not that simple. It's an extremely unique language. We coached [Brody and Felicity Jones] and they did a fabulous job but we also wanted to perfect it so that not even locals will spot any difference." AI tool, Respeecher, was reportedly used to enhance the actors' speech and "enhance specific letters of their vocal sounds". Jancsó even fed the AI his own dialogue to help shape an authentic Hungarian dialect; "Most of their Hungarian dialogue has a part of me talking in there. We were very careful about keeping their performances. It's mainly just replacing letters here and there. 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 (production)." The use of AI to enhance dialogue has been met by critique online, with one user on X accusing the film of "manipulating the actors' accents, a fundamental aspect of... acting. This is a disgrace". Another user said: "The use of AI to enhance an actor's accent as the case seems to be in #TheBrutalist is a red line crossed. The magic seems to wear off when you replace human talent with an algorithmic output." The backlash from the editor's openness to the use of generative AI could see Academy voters turn away from The Brutalist when Oscars voting begins, especially considering the ongoing fight for actors' rights against artificial intelligence. On Reddit, the opinion is more mixed with some users accepting the fact that AI has been used to improve dialogue for the audience's benefit. U/sotommy said: "As a Hungarian, it's completely understandable. They would never sound like native speakers, it's just almost impossible to do it naturally. They did not alter the accents, only the Hungarian dialogue. I'm actually really thankful for this gesture because they could have just ignored the authenticity, which would have meant nothing to the rest of the world." The use of AI here is minimal, with an element of creativity that relies on Jancsó's own language to merge sounds and create an authentic experience. It's also worth noting that many films might use similar editing techniques, although directors and editors are not often as upfront about it, as on this occasion. While you'd expect AI-enhanced dialogue might be the main area for criticism when it comes to the way gen AI is used in The Brutalist, it's actually not the only instance of artificial intelligence in the film. Towards the end of the movie, there's a sequence of scenes where AI has been used to create architectural drawings and buildings. Jancsó spoke on the matter, saying "it is controversial in the industry to talk about AI, but it shouldn't be. "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." Considering just how controversial the use of AI in cinema is, even generating a small element of a highly-regarded film like The Brutalist is enough to make front-page news. While we're unsure how the topic of AI could impact the way the Academy nominates and ultimately votes for Oscars, it's fair to say that headlines like these won't do The Brutalist any favors. With nominations dropping on January 23, we won't know if The Brutalist can shake off these AI criticisms and win big at the 97th Academy Awards until March 3.

The Brutalist and Emilia Perez's voice-cloning controversies make AI the new awards season battleground

Two leading contenders for Oscars this year have revealed use of artificial intelligence in the editing suite - will it affect their chances? The use of artificial intelligence could become a ferocious battleground during movie awards season, as at least two major contenders were revealed to have used voice-cloning to enhance actors' performances. In an interview with moving-image tech publication Red Shark News, The Brutalist editor Dávid Jancsó said that, in an effort to create Hungarian dialogue so perfect "that not even locals will spot any difference", Jancsó fed lead actors Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones's voices into AI software, as well his own. In the film, Brody plays Jewish-Hungarian architect László Tóth, who emigrates to the US after the second world war, and Jones is his wife Erzsébet. Jancsó, a Hungarian speaker, said that while Brody's mother was an émigré from Hungary in real life, "coaching" and re-recording via ADR (automated dialogue replacement) with both the original actors and stand-ins "just didn't work". Jancsó said he then employed an AI tool developed by Respeecher, a Ukraine-based company who were previously involved in the "cloning" of the voice of James Earl Jones for the TV series Obi-Wan Kenobi, to add individual sounds and letters to both Brody and Jones's Hungarian-language dialogue. "Most of their Hungarian dialogue has a part of me talking in there. We were very careful about keeping their performances. It's mainly just replacing letters here and there ... We had so much dialogue in Hungarian that we really needed to speed up the process otherwise we'd still be in post." It also emerged that AI cloning was used to enhance the singing voice of Emilia Pérez's Karla Sofía Gascón, in the trans gangster musical directed by Jacques Audiard. In an interview recorded in May at the Cannes film festival, the film's re-recording mixer Cyril Holtz said that it was necessary to increase the range of Gascón's vocal register and that the production utilised Respeecher to blend their singing with that of Camille, the French pop star who co-wrote the film's score. Conversely Heretic, the horror movie starring Hugh Grant, has taken a radical anti-AI stance, with its end credits including the message: "No generative AI was used in the making of this film." The recent actors' and writers' strike were called at least in part over the threat that AI poses to large parts of the film and TV and video game industry, with settlements including "guardrails" against the use of AI to generate scripts. A strike by video game actors over replicating their voices is still ongoing. Film-maker Paul Schrader revealed in a post on Facebook that he had also been experimenting with AI, using ChatGPT to generate ideas for films by major auteurs, including Paul Thomas Anderson, Quentin Tarantino, Ingmar Bergman and himself. Writing, "I'M STUNNED", he added: "Every idea ChatGPT came up with (in a few seconds) was good. And original. And fleshed out. Why should writers sit around for months searching for a good idea when AI can provide one in seconds?" Rather than it being an endorsement for AI, Schrader told the Guardian: "People mistakenly think AI is a technological advance like [the] automobile when in fact it's a virus driven by a hyperbolic curve." In Hollywood's currently febrile mood over AI, it is hard to estimate the impact these revelations of the technology's use may have on the current Oscars race, for which the final nominations are due to be announced on 23 January. Brody is now a strong contender for the best actor award, having won the Golden Globe for best actor in a drama, while Gascón looks likely to be the first out trans actor to be nominated for the best actress Oscar.

The Brutalist director defends use of AI to 'refine' his lead stars' performances

The director of The Brutalist has defended his lead actors' performances after it emerged that artificial intelligence had been used to "refine" their Hungarian accents. Brady Corbet insisted that the performances of Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones were "completely their own". Brody leads the three-hour film, playing Hungarian architect Laszlo Toth, a man trying to rebuild his life in the US following World War Two. Felicity Jones plays his wife, Erzsebet. The film won three Golden Globes earlier this month, and is expected to receive nods at the forthcoming Oscar nominations. In a statement, shared with Deadline, Corbet said: "Adrien and Felicity's performances are completely their own." He said they had "worked for months" with a dialect coach "to perfect their accents", but that technology provided by the company Respeecher had been used "in Hungarian language dialogue editing only". Based in Ukraine, Respeecher says it offers filmmakers the chance to "experience the future of voice cloning" with their "cutting-edge AI solutions". Corbet said it had been used "specifically to refine certain vowels and letters for accuracy", going on to say "no English language was changed". It was described as "a manual process", carried out by "our sound team and Respeecher in post-production". Corbet said it had been done "with the utmost respect for the craft", adding that "the aim was to preserve the authenticity of Adrien and Felicity's performances in another language, not to replace or alter them". He also said production designer Judy Becker and her team "did not use AI to create or render any of the buildings" shown in the movie's closing sequence. Corbet's remarks followed an interview with the film's editor David Jansco, who told tech magazine Red Shark News that changes had been made to "perfect" Brody and Jones's Hungarian accents. A native Hungarian himself, Jansco said it was one of the "most difficult languages to learn to pronounce". He said they had tried to use ADR (automated dialogue replacement) on some of the sounds and letters but it hadn't worked, and attempts to "ADR them completely with other actors" also failed. He said they then "looked for other options of how to enhance it", eventually recording the actors' voices with the AI software, along with his own voice. He went on: "Most of their Hungarian dialogue has a part of me talking in there. "We were very careful about keeping their performances. It's mainly just replacing letters here and there." Jansco also said AI had been used to create a series of architectural drawings and finished buildings at the end of the film. Meanwhile, the same AI company, Respeecher, appears to have worked on another film getting plenty of Oscars buzz, the operatic musical Emilia Perez. The company congratulated the film's cast and creatives on their Facebook page after they won four Golden Globes earlier this month. They wrote: "At Respeecher, we're proud to have been credited in this incredible production, which continues to spark important conversations and push creative boundaries." They did not specify what part they had played in the production. But in an interview at the Cannes Film Festival in May, the film's re-recording mixer Cyril Holtz spoke about using AI software to increase the vocal range of one of the film's stars, trans actress Karla Sofia Gascon. Holtz said the singing voice of Camille, a French pop star who co-wrote the film's score, was blended into Gascon's to increase their upper range. Sky News has contacted the studios behind The Brutalist and Emilia Perez, and Respeecher for comment. Safeguards against the use of AI were one of the key points on the agenda during negotiations between actors, writers and Hollywood studios across months of strikes in the US in 2023. Oscar nominations will be revealed on Thursday. Emilia Perez is streaming on Netflix now. The Brutalist is in UK cinemas from Friday.

When does an actor stop, and AI begin? What The Brutalist and Emilia Pérez tell us about AI in Hollywood

The Brutalist has drawn attention this week for its use of artificial intelligence (AI) to refine some of the actors' dialogue. Emilia Pérez, a musical crime comedy, also used AI to extend lead star Karla Sofía Gascón's vocal range. Her singing voice was blended with that of French popstar Camille, who co-wrote the film. Earlier this month, Adrien Brody won the Golden Globe for best male actor for The Brutalist for his portrayal of the fictional Hungarian-Jewish Holocaust survivor László Tóth. He is a favourite to win the award at the Oscars, and Emilia Pérez is also a strong contender this awards season. But should actors be eligible for awards if AI was used to refine a performance? Can AI make 'perfect' possible? The Brutalist's editor, Dávid Jancsó, was the first to discuss the film's use of AI. A native Hungarian speaker, Jancsó wanted the Hungarian language dialogue to sound flawless, "so that not even locals will spot any difference". Director Brady Corbet has been quick to clarify exactly how AI was used, emphasising the performances of Brody and his co-star Felicity Jones are their own. In a statement, Corbet explained an AI tool from Ukrainian software company Respeecher was used only to edit the Hungarian language dialogue, "specifically to refine certain vowels and letters for accuracy". Corbet insists Brody's and Jones' performances in The Brutalist haven't been replaced. Instead, they consented to a process of their voices being merged with dialogue recorded by Jancsó to ensure accurate Hungarian pronunciation. Their English dialogue remains untouched. For Emilia Pérez, the film's re-recording mixer Cyril Holtz said the process of extending Gascón's range required collaboration from multiple artists. AI in the film and television industry was a major concern of the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike - and the fight for protections in the industry is far from over. While the use of AI here may be limited to refining language portrayal, or extending a singer's vocal range, it raises broader questions: what level of authenticity and accuracy are we comfortable with? If AI makes "perfect" possible, are we setting "perfect" as the new standard? The role of the accent coach Brody and Jones worked with accent coach Tanera Marshall to hone their Hungarian accents for The Brutalist. This accent is used in their English dialogue, which comprises the majority of the film. As a voice and accent coach, my work involves training and supporting an actor's voice to meet the demands of performance spaces, character and script. This includes building stamina for healthy, sustainable vocal use and equipping actors with skills to learn different accents. By working with an accent coach, actors develop a dexterity key for mastering new accents and sustaining them throughout a performance. Voice and accent work is central to a transformation into a character. Accents aren't merely about modifying vowels and consonants. They involve rhythm, intonation, melody, and resonance. These elements inform and are informed by the life of the character. For Brody and Jones, learning a Hungarian accent would have been integral to their process. The accent is inseparable from the portrayal of their characters. It's standard practice for actors to re-record some dialogue in automated dialogue replacement (ADR) during post-production. This can address background noise, minor script changes or accent slips. The accent coach typically accompanies the actor in the sound studio to ensure consistency. However, according to Jancsó, even ADR wasn't enough to perfect the Hungarian dialogue in The Brutalist. That's when AI was introduced. Accents are expressions of cultural identity, conveying as much about a character as their appearance. There is always a degree of variance as the actor makes the accent and performance their own. That's part of creating a believable performance. Unfortunately, filmmakers sometimes overlook the importance of accurate accent portrayal, opting instead for what they perceive as more universally accessible or commercially viable accents, or prioritising other elements of production like pacing or visual effects over linguistic precision. The Brutalist's commitment to linguistic precision is commendable. But are we comfortable with AI being the solution? Read more: Why bad posh English accents still rule Hollywood, from Nosferatu to Gladiator II And the award goes to ... AI? The editing process revealed by The Brutalist and Emilia Pérez may be more common than we realise. Rami Malek's singing as Freddie Mercury in the biopic Bohemian Rhapsody (2018) was a mix of Queen master tapes, recordings by Canadian Christian rock singer Marc Martel (known for sounding like Mercury) and Malek's voice. Malek still won the best actor Oscar for his performance, even though the vocals were a blend. They were just one element of Bohemian Rhapsody, in the same way the Hungarian dialogue is just one aspect of The Brutalist. In September 2024, Screen Australia released key principles to guide its approach to AI, prioritising human talent, transparency, ethical design, diversity, equity and inclusion, fairness and responsibility. Much like these guidelines suggest, in The Brutalist and Emilia Pérez, the actors gave their consent, their talent was prioritised, and the filmmakers were transparent about the process. There's even an argument that The Brutalist's dedication to accurate Hungarian representation promotes inclusivity for an underrepresented language in Hollywood. But it's a slippery slope. When does refining turn into creating an entire voice through AI? And if accents and vocal ranges become easily modifiable, how long before actors themselves are at risk of redundancy? The Brutalist is an exploration of complex themes around artistic integrity. Ironically, it may lean on technology that risks undermining the authenticity it strives to achieve. This paradox is worth reflecting on. In perfecting the portrayal of the human experience, are we losing some of its essence?

Oscar hopeful 'The Brutalist' used AI during production

The filmmakers behind The Brutalist, a likely Oscar contender currently being distributed by A24, used AI to alter actor's dialogue and create images used in the film's epilogue, the film's editor Dávid Jancsó shared in an interview with RedShark News. The epic drama follows a fictional Hungarian architect (as played by Adrien Brody) who struggles to make art under the fickle system of American capitalism (and the weirdos that run it). To make Brody and his costar Felicity Jones' Hungarian pronunciation as accurate as possible, Jancsó says the production used AI from a company called Respeecher to alter the actor's speech. Respeecher was able to adjust the actor's vocals to make them match a native Hungarian speaker's pronunciation, though Jancsó says the process didn't do anything you couldn't achieve with traditional dialogue editing. "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." Generative AI was also used to help create architectural drawings used near the end of the film, according to Jancsó. Both decisions were made because of the budgetary constraints the production was under. The Brutalist is an over three-hour film with multiple stars, period-appropriate costuming, and elaborate sets, that was reportedly made for less than $10 million. A little over a year after multiple Hollywood unions went on strike over the possibility of studios using AI to replace workers, it's still highly controversial to use the tech, let alone be open about it. But the problem is undeniably complicated when there are so many different ways AI can be used. "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," Brady Corbet, the director of The Brutalist, told The Hollywood Reporter in a statement. Respeecher was previously used to create new Darth Vader dialogue for Disney+'s Obi-Wan-Kenobi, and this likely won't be the last time similar tools are used to cut costs. Making movies requires a lot of resources, and while companies are trying to get AI to catch on, using AI tools will likely remain a viable options to save time and money.

"The Brutalist" director clarifies the usage of AI amid intense backlash

TL;DR: The awards season frontrunner The Brutalist faces intense backlash over using AI tools during post-production. The movie's director, Brady Corbet, responded to the criticism, stating that the crew only used AI to refine the authenticity of a few Hungarian dialogues in the film and that it didn't replace the actors' hard work. The AI tools in question come from the Ukranian company Respeecher. Corbet told The Hollywood Reporter that they only used the tools in post-production to enhance the accuracy of specific Hungarian vowel and letter sounds spoken by Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones. He maintains that the AI editing did not replace their months of work perfecting their accents with a dialect coach. The film's editor, Dávid Jancsó, who first revealed the AI usage in an interview with Red Shark News, explained that as a native Hungarian speaker, he recognized how challenging those nuanced sounds can be for non-native actors. Since the film had a tight budget of around $10 million, they opted to use AI to make targeted adjustments at scale rather than manually editing each sound they figured could be improved. Jancsó also insisted that the work done in post was almost identical to traditional dialogue editing techniques, except aided by technology instead of human editors. "We were very careful about keeping their performances. 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." Jancsó also revealed that the production team used some AI in background architectural renderings. Corbet clarified that they did not use it to create or render any full building designs; they only used images made to look like dated digital renders. Critics have praised Brody's and Jones's acting performances in the WWII refugee drama. However, the mere notion of employing AI has stoked controversy, with some arguing it should disqualify the film from awards. Besides The Brutalist, other hit films from last year, including Civil War, Alien: Romulus, and Furiosa have also faced criticism for using AI. After the 2023 writers and actors strike, such sentiments reached a boiling point that demanded reassurances that technology wouldn't replace human creativity. The Brutalist is not the first film to use Respeecher. The AI voice cloning technology became popular after adding the voice of James Earl Jones to Disney's Obi-Wan Kenobi series.

Did 'The Brutalist' Use AI in the Movie: Controversy Explained

Oscars 2025 nominations are upon and The Brutalist is emerging as one of the favorite movies to clinch the prestigious award. However, a controversy has erupted over the use of AI in The Brutalist. On January 11, 2025, the editor of the movie Dávid Jancsó featured in an interview on Red Shark and talked about using artificial intelligence in the movie. Since then, platforms like X (formerly Twitter) and Reddit have seen opinions en masse from fans and movie critics about the use of AI in the Brutalist. In the interview, Jancsó confirmed that they used Ukranian software called Respeecher to improve the Hungarian dialogue by lead actors of the movie including Adrien Brody (whose mother is a Hungarian refugee), Felicity Jones, and Guy Pearce. "I am a native Hungarian speaker and I know that it is one of the most difficult languages to learn to pronounce. Even with Adrien's Hungarian background - (Brody's mother is a Hungarian refugee who emigrated to the U.S in 1956) - it's not that simple. It's an extremely unique language. We coached [Brody and Felicity Jones] and they did a fabulous job but we also wanted to perfect it so that not even locals will spot any difference." - Dávid Jancsó, Editor of The Brutalist Jancsó further explained that they tried to ADR the dialogue in the Hungarian language with lead actors and other actors, but the results were not satisfactory. Both Brody and Jones agreed to use Respeecher to make the Hungarian dialogue in the movie clear and accurate for the native speakers of the language. The process involved mainly replacing some letters and no performances in the English language were affected or altered using the tool, says Jancsó. Another usage of generative AI in The Brutalist that Jancsó highlighted in the interview is seemingly coming out to be a major concern for movie critics. Jancsó said that they used AI in "a sequence at the Venice Biennale to conjure a series of architectural drawings and finished buildings in the style of the fictional architect." He mentioned this was done to speed up the process and save money. He said that it is something that has been done before and the use of AI in movies should not be a controversial topic. "It is controversial in the industry to talk about AI, but it shouldn't be. 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." - Dávid Jancsó The Brutalist is about the renowned architect László Toth and his wife Erzsébet who fled war-torn Europe in 1947 to America. There they meet Harrison Van Buren, an industrialist who commissions László to build a structure in honor of his mother. This project brings a life-changing experience for László, in both good and bad ways. Now that the controversy of using generative AI for architectural drawings in The Brutalist has erupted, fans are calling out the hypocrisy of the movie makers, considering the entire plot of the movie revolves around a man who comes to an untraveled country to become a prolific architect. Some X users said that The Brutalist should be disqualified from The Oscars for the use of artificial intelligence. Now, The Brutalist director Brady Corbet has issued a statement to Deadline clarifying that the use of AI was done to smoothen the Hungarian accent in the movie and it did not affect the performances by Adrien and Jones. "Adrien and Felicity's performances are completely their own. 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." - Brady Corbet He also said that AI was not used to render any drawings of the structures in the movie. All the images were hand-drawn by artists. "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." While The Brutalist has found itself embroiled in the AI controversy, another Oscar contender Emilia Perez, a musical drama by Netflix has also found itself in the midst of it. Emilia Perez is about four women, one of which is Emilia, a Cartel leader. She takes the help of her lawyer to fake her death and start afresh. The movie has been nominated for 11 BAFTA awards and has garnered positive reviews from critics. In an interview at the Cannes Film Festival, it was confirmed that AI was used to enhance the range of the singing voice of Karla Sofìa Gascón in the movie. Respeecher, the software used to refine Hungarian dialogue in The Brutalist, was used in Emilia Perz as well. Now, that the movie is one of the frontrunners for the Oscars, fans have started calling out the AI usage and are demanding disqualification.

Did Films 'The Brutalist' and 'Emilia Pérez' Cross the Line with AI Voice Editing? - Decrypt

Golden Globe-winning films The Brutalist and Emilia Pérez have come under fire for using AI to modify actors' voices in their critically acclaimed films. "The Brutalist," starring Adrien Brody, Felicity Jones, and Guy Pearce, depicts a visionary architect who, after escaping postwar Europe, revitalizes his life and career in America with the help of a wealthy industrialist. "Emilia Pérez," meanwhile, follows Manitas del Monte, a Mexican cartel boss who becomes Emilia Pérez, played by Karla Sofia Gascon. Alongside her lawyer Rita, played by Zoe Saldaña, and wife Jessi, played by Selena Gomez, the film intertwines their dramatic transformations with musical interludes. The current controversy comes on the heels of a months-long strike in 2023, where Hollywood's use of artificial intelligence in lieu of paid human actors was a hot-button issue. But in an interview with Red Shark News, Hungary-born The Brutalist editor Dávid Jancsó revealed how the AI-powered tool Respeecher -- like Autotune for dialogue -- enhanced the Hungarian pronunciation of the film's two lead actors. "I am a native Hungarian speaker and I know that it is one of the most difficult languages to learn to pronounce," Jancsó said. "It's an extremely unique language. 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." According to Jancsó, stars Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones were onboard with the use of AI to enhance their voices using his own. "Most of their Hungarian dialogue has a part of me talking in there," he said. "We were very careful about keeping their performances. It's mainly just replacing letters here and there. You can do this in ProTools yourself, but we had so much dialogue in Hungarian that we really needed to speed up the process." One of the concerns that SAG-AFTRA members had during the 2023 strikes was that AI would be used to replace them and that their likenesses would be used without compensation. "The most important point is that we're talking about emerging technology that is going to affect the entire world," SAG-AFTRA spokesperson Zeke Alton previously told Decrypt during a media Q&A. "We just happen to be the canary in the coal mine. We're setting a precedent for how the workforce in general, both the United States and around the world, is going to be treated," they said. While the use of AI in film productions remains controversial, AI developers cheered the use of the technology. "The Brutalist" production used GenAI from Ukrainian Respeecher to subtly improve American actors' pronunciation of Hungarian, infamously difficult to learn & speak," Sr. Staff Researcher at Google Deepmind Alex Polozov said on X (formerly Twitter). Great example of using AI tools to enhance well-known art creation process, not replace it." The Brutalist director Brady Corbet addressed the controversy in an interview with Indiewire. "Adrien and Felicity's performances are completely their own. They worked for months with dialect coach Tanera Marshall to perfect their accents," Corbet said. "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." Corbet added that AI was used in post-production 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." For his part, Jancsó defended using AI in The Brutalist, emphasizing its role as a practical tool rather than a groundbreaking innovation. "We should be having a very open discussion about what tools AI can provide us with," he said. "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." In May, during an interview at the Cannes Film Festival, Cyril Holtz, the sound mixer for Emilia Pérez, highlighted the practical applications of technologies like Respeecher, a voice and image cloning software to extend the vocal range of Gascon. "Voice actors are -- and will always be -- an essential part of quality AI voice synthesis," Respeecher CEO Alex Serdiuk said in a statement posted on X. "We developed Respeecher as an auxiliary tool that helps voice actors scale, monetize, and secure their voices. One of our guiding principles is 'Empower, not replace.'"

'The Brutalist' used AI voice editing. Is that such a crime?

The Brutalist, a three-and-a-half-hour awards favorite, is a film about human creativity. Ironically, its biggest scandal surrounds artificial intelligence. Brady Corbet's epic follows Hungarian Jew László Tóth, played by Adrien Brody, as he flees the Nazis and picks up his architecture practice in the United States. Eventually he manages to bring his wife, Erzsébet, played by Felicity Jones, to join him. Both characters frequently speak in Hungarian throughout the film. That dialogue, it turns out, may have been supplemented by an AI speech tool. In an interview with RedShark News, The Brutalist's editor, Dávid Jancsó, revealed that the film had employed Respeecher, an AI voice editing tool. Cinephiles online blew up, with some even planning to boycott the film. Corbet is now on an oddball apology tour, clarifying just how AI was used by the production. But he shouldn't have to be. The mass freakout fundamentally misunderstands what film editing actually looks like, and how films stay on budget. Jancsó is a native Hungarian speaker; he knows how difficult the language is to replicate. That's true even for Brody, whose mother is in fact a Hungarian refugee. While producers coached Brody and Jones intensively, they used the AI tool Respeecher to insert some of Jancsó's own pronunciations into the dialogue.

The Brutalist's AI controversy sparks heated ethical debate

Brady Corbet's period drama The Brutalist was highly anticipated by film and architecture fans alike, bringing the promise of a powerful tale inspired by history and heritage. Since its release, the film has been criticised for its use of AI augmentation, and while the director defends its usage, it calls forth an important ethical debate about the use of AI in filmmaking. It's no secret that AI productivity tools are becoming widely used across all industries, yet in creative sectors, AI remains a highly controversial topic. While The Brutalist's integration of AI technology is markedly considered, critics fear that it may be the tip of the iceberg, ushering in a new era of synthetic AI embellishment. In an enlightening interview with Red Shark News, editor Dávid Jancsó discusses the film's "subtle and sensitive use of AI," including voice editing and specific background drawings. To refine the Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones' Hungarian dialect, the team used AI technology from Respeecher, making tweaks to vocal sounds and intonations to maximise authenticity. "We were very careful about keeping their performances. It's mainly just replacing letters here and there," David says. A series of architectural drawings created in the style of the fictional architect was created using Gen AI, a detail that some fans strongly criticised. "They used AI in The Brutalist not only to avoid paying visual artists for their work but also to manipulate the actors' accents, a fundamental aspect of... acting. this is a disgrace," one X user claimed. "The use of generative AI visuals honestly feels like it spits in the face of the themes of a movie about art and architecture and the human condition," another added. Despite heated critique, director Brady Corbet defended the film's use of AI, responding in a statement to Variety "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." Regarding the AI imagery, Brady says: "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." Whether or not you agree with The Brutalist's use of AI, the irony of its use in a film centred around human artistry is hard to ignore. While the film's AI use was arguably considered and sparse, in the wake of SAG-AFTRA strikes and open letters protesting 'unethical' AI usage, it seems there will always be uncomfortable tension around the future of AI in filmmaking. As X user @alirichthem notes, a surprising number of popular films have utilised Respeecher's AI tools. While AI tools will likely continue to be integrated into creative practice, The Brutalist's transparency is a positive step in demystifying the perceived threat of AI in filmmaking.

AI-enhanced films 'The Brutalist' and 'Emilia Pérez' score Oscar nominations for acting, editing

Two films facing controversy over their use of artificial intelligence led the nominees for the Academy Awards announced Thursday. "The Brutalist," a drama about a Hungarian-Jewish architect who survives the Holocaust and flees to the U.S., garnered 10 nominations, while "Emilia Pérez," a musical centered on a transgender Mexican cartel leader, led all films with 13 nominations. Both movies have been the subject of criticism this month for using AI to enhance actors' voices. "The Brutalist" also caught blowback for employing AI to supplement the visuals in the film's ending sequence. Nominations for "The Brutalist" include Adrien Brody for best actor and Felicity Jones for best supporting actress, while "Emilia Pérez" star Karla Sofía Gascón is up for best actress. Both films earned nods for best picture and best film editing. "Emilia Pérez" was nominated for best sound. Artificial intelligence has been a point of contention in Hollywood in recent years. The technology is frequently used in the moviemaking process for tasks such as dubbing or color correction and is not grounds for disqualifying a film from Academy Award nomination. Still, it was a key issue during the 2023 actors' and writers' strikes, during which creators expressed fears around AI replacing their work and impacting their pay. Both the Writers Guild of America and SAG-AFTRA, the entertainers' and artists' union, reached agreements with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers that included conditions and compensation for productions that use generative AI and digital replicas of performers. But the agreements also left unresolved questions such as how freely studios can train AI with preexisting content. SAG-AFTRA did not immediately respond to a CNBC request for comment Thursday. The tensions around AI flared earlier this month following an interview with "The Brutalist" director and co-writer Brady Corbet and film editor David Jancso, both of whom received Oscar nominations Thursday, that discussed AI's role in the movie. Jancso told media outlet RedShark he used AI tool Respeecher to clone and enhance Brody's and Jones' Hungarian-language dialogue. Respeecher was necessary to nail the pronunciations of certain letters and sounds, he said, and it was faster than using other software platforms to edit the dialogue. Jancso also said he used generative AI to help create architectural drawings and buildings shown in the movie's finale. "It is controversial in the industry to talk about AI, but it shouldn't be," he said in that 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." The story caused a firestorm on social media, where some users condemned the use of AI and said they wouldn't watch the film. Corbet defended the performances, telling Variety, "Adrien and Felicity's performances are completely their own." "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," Corbet said, according to Variety. "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."

Film director clarifies that historical epic The Brutalist did use AI during production, but not how you think

The Brutalist, the Adrien Brody-led historical fiction epic currently in theatres, has cinema sickos like me frothing at the mouth. For a start, it's already won three Golden Globes, and for another, The Brutalist is one of vanishingly few pictures to be shot entirely in VistaVision since the 1960s. Besides that though, this period piece is also notable for how it's leveraging more recent technological advancements -- namely, AI. The Brutalist builds the life story of fictional architect László Toth brick-by-brick, a Hungarian-born Jew who flees Europe amid antisemitic persecution. Though leading actors Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones both worked with dialect coach Tanera Marshall to perfect their Hungarian accents, it's since come to light that AI was used as part of the post-production process to alter lines of spoken dialogue. In a statement issued to Deadline, director Brady Corbet insisted that Jones and Brody's performances remain "completely their own" though. Corbet explains, "Innovative Respeecher technology was used in Hungarian language dialogue editing only, specifically to refine certain vowels and letters for accuracy. No English language [dialogue] 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." Deadline also claims that generative AI was used to create architectural blueprints shown during one of the film's final sequences, though Corbet writes, "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." As for the buildings so pivotal to the film's architectural arc, Corbet says, "[Production designer] Judy Becker and her team did not use AI to create or render any of the buildings." The post-production use of AI first came to light earlier this month in an interview between the film's editor, Dávid Jancsó, and Red Shark News. This article originally claimed that GenAI was used to create both architectural drawings as well as the finished buildings seen onscreen. A more recent update from Red Shark News responds to Corbet's claims, citing this 2022 interview for Film Maker Magazine with Judy Becker. In this earlier interview, Becker says that architecture consultant Griffin Frazen used Midjourney to quickly generate a number of Brutalist-style structures that would then be "redrawn by an illustrator to create mythical buildings." Based on this, it appears that AI was definitely involved during the initial ideation process, but AI-generated images did not end up onscreen wholesale. This admitted use of Midjourney as a jumping-off point in pre-production is still disheartening though, as many creatives would argue that the ability to ideate is a foundational part of the work. As for the spoken Hungarian dialogue, let's return to that interview between Red Shark News and Dávid Jancsó. Jancsó is a native speaker of Hungarian himself, and says that both Brody and Jones "did a fabulous job" speaking "one of the most difficult languages to learn to pronounce." Still, the production team wanted the spoken Hungarian dialogue to sound so authentic that "not even locals will spot any difference." Jancsó elaborates that the post-production team's first port of call was a more traditional method of ADR, with actors re-recording lines in a sound studio. The level of authenticity sought continued to prove elusive throughout these sessions though, which finally brings us to the involvement of Ukraine-based speech synthesis company Respeecher. Respeecher's technology has previously been used to clone the voice of a younger Mark Hamill for the Mandalorian, and Jancsó goes on to assuage a number of ethical concerns I had about how the company creates its synthetic voices. In the case of The Brutalist, actors Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones both willingly contributed their voices to the AI model in order to create the appropriate audio target for the eventual cloned voices. Dávid Jancsó also contributed his own voice to the model to help create the desired Hungarian pronunciation. Jancsó told Red Shark News, "Most of their Hungarian dialogue has a part of me talking in there. We were very careful about keeping their performances. It's mainly just replacing letters here and there. 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." As a Brit, I've definitely heard my fair share of poorly imitated regional accents -- and as an occasional German speaker, I am frequently humbled when native speakers switch to English once they get a load of my abysmal accent. Speaking like a local in any target language is no easy feat, even for the most talented actor, and going to such lengths to faithfully portray spoken Hungarian to a broad audience is laudable. What's also praise-worthy is the actually thoughtful and considered use of AI. For a start, AI was implemented as a tool to be used by human hands, and not a haphazard replacement cynically intended to eliminate a job. Furthermore, the production team did not rely on established audio models utilising questionably sourced datasets -- everyone who gave voice to The Brutalist's spoken Hungarian dialogue appears to have had a real say in it. Alongside that GPU fan 'organ' I wrote about last year, it's one more example that proves AI can be utilised in a considered way that doesn't replace actual human artists.

'The Brutalist' director responds to film's controversy over using AI

The film won three Golden Globes and has received several other nominations. Brady Corbet, director of critically acclaimed film "The Brutalist," is responding to criticism of his Golden Globe winning film after it was revealed artificial intelligence was used in the production to "perfect" the actors' accents. Referring to "The Brutalist" stars Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones, Corbet described their performances as "completely their own" following backlash and clarified the use of AI in the film. In a statement from Corbet obtained by "Good Morning America" on Tuesday, the director said, "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." He added, "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." The comments come after Dávid Jancsó, an editor on the film, said in an interview with video production news publication RedShark News, published Jan. 11, that AI was used to improve the actors' accents when their characters spoke Hungarian in the film. Jancsó said that after attempting to use automated dialogue replacement both with the actors, and then with alternative actors, they finally settled on using Respeecher, a Ukranian technology that focuses on speech synthesis which allows voices to be altered and switched. "Most of their Hungarian dialogue has a part of me talking in there. We were very careful about keeping their performances. It's mainly just replacing letters here and there. 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," he told the outlet. In the film, Brody plays Jewish Hungarian architect László Tóth, who immigrates to post-war America, where he attempts to rebuild his career while reconnecting with his wife, played by Jones. Since the revelation that AI was used in the film, critics have called into question whether the movie, whose primary focus is artistic integrity, should still be considered for some of the film industry's highest honors as the Academy Awards approach. Corbet said production designer Judy Becker "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," he said. He added, "'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." "The Brutalist" has already received three Golden Globe Awards including best motion picture (drama), best director and best performance by a male actor for Brody. The film was also nominated for nine awards at the 2025 BAFTA Film Awards and nine awards at the 2025 Critics Choice Awards.

The Most Mind-Numbing Backlash of the Oscar Season Is Here

Yes, The Brutalist Used A.I. It Only Gets More Complicated From There. If you were on social media over the holiday weekend -- and really, what better use of a holiday weekend is there -- you might have noticed a controversy brewing around the use of artificial intelligence in The Brutalist, Brady Corbet's sprawling saga about a Jewish architect who escapes the Holocaust and immigrates to the U.S. to ply his trade. If you didn't happen to catch the initial backlash, good news: By Monday, Variety, the Hollywood Reporter, and Deadline had all picked up the story, and by this morning the internet was awash in aggregations and explainers, all blossoming two days before the Oscar nominations are announced. The flap traced back to an article published by RedShark News on Jan. 11 -- an eternity ago in internet time -- that actually praised the film's "subtle and sensitive" use of artificial intelligence. Editor Dávid Jancsó detailed how the production used a tool called Respeecher to enhance "certain sounds" in Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones' Hungarian dialogue. Jancsó, a native speaker, explained that Hungarian is "one of the most difficult languages to learn to pronounce," and even after working with a dialogue coach, there were still lingering inaccuracies. So the actors' lines were fed into Respeecher's model, along with Jancsó's own voice, to smooth things out. "We were very careful about keeping their performances," Jancsó said. "It's mainly just replacing letters here and there." This wasn't exactly a secret -- Respeecher's name and logo are featured in The Brutalist's end credits -- nor is this an entirely new process: The tool was also used in The Brutalist's fellow awards contenders Emilia Pérez and Maria in order to combine the actors' voices with those of a professional singer, and a similar process was used back in 2018 on Rami Malek's Oscar-winning performance as Freddie Mercury in Bohemian Rhapsody. And if the article had stopped there, that might have been that. But it went on to explain how the film also used generative A.I. to "conjure a series of architectural drawings and finished buildings in the style of the fictional architect" for its final sequence, which takes place at a retrospective of the title character's career. That passage was what set people off, especially the version aggregated by a little-known website called FeatureFirst on Jan. 18. The FeatureFirst version of the story gets details wrong, including the allegation that generative A.I. was used to "entirely create a sequence towards the end of the movie," and alleges that "many people" have argued that the film's use of A.I. "diminishes the craftsmanship and human creativity that audiences expect in a film centered on architecture" without providing a link to a single source. But nothing creates controversy like the word "controversy," and soon enough, writers like New Yorker tech columnist Kyle Chayka were circulating the story. "The Brutalist used AI to make those architectural drawings at the end of the movie," Chayka wrote on Bluesky, "that's why they were so so bad." My feeds filled up with people pledging to avoid the film on principle: "If the claims about the brutalist using generative ai are true then it's being taken off my watchlist lickety split." "My excitement for the brutalist genuinely went from 100 to 1 with this one AI revelation." The speed and intensity of the reaction mirrored the incident in March 2024 when it was revealed that the low-budget horror movie Late Night With the Devil had used generative A.I. for some of its designs. The film's directors quickly moved to minimize the offense, claiming they had only used A.I. for "three still images" that they "edited further" and only appear as "brief interstitials," but the damage seemed to have been done. A movie that few people had heard of became a movie that everyone had heard of practically overnight, and little of what they were hearing was good. After opening to good reviews and an impressive haul of nearly $3 million in its first weekend, the movie started bleeding viewers, dropping nearly 85 percent by its third week in release. The Brutalist isn't likely to see a similar plunge, but as the current favorite for both Best Picture and Best Actor, the scrappy little movie that has spent months being lauded for achieving epic scope on an artisanal budget has suddenly become the biggest target there is. "It's cool that you shot on location, brought back VistaVison, blew that shit up to 70mm, got a 214 minute cut out to multiplexes and avoided an NC-17 narrowly," wrote one Bluesky user, "but none of this matters all that much when you're feeding your dialogue to AI software." After the Blake Lively-Justin Baldoni lawsuit's lesson in how Hollywood publicists can manipulate and amplify online criticism, the fact that this particular criticism is surging just as the Oscar race heats up should perhaps raise at least a bit of a brow. Corbet rushed to explain in a statement that The Brutalist's dialogue adjustment was "a manual process," and that the film's production designer, Judy Becker, "did not use AI to create or render any of the buildings," although he did allow that "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." But in a 2022 interview with Filmmaker magazine, Becker said that the film's architecture consultant had used the generative A.I. program Midjourney to "create three Brutalist buildings quite quickly," which she planned to have redrawn by an illustrator to "create mythical buildings." The accompanying image, credited to Midjourney, will instill a sense of déjà vu in anyone who has seen The Brutalist: A vast concrete hall with light streaming from the ceiling and a massive Christian cross in its center. It's not precisely the same design as the chapel we see in the movie, where the cross is made of light instead of stone, but it's certainly in the same aesthetic family. Given that studio executives have openly fantasized about replacing living actors with computer-generated doubles, the film industry is understandably on edge about the encroachment of A.I., a circumstance some have responded to by drawing a line in the sand. But grouping disparate technologies under the umbrella of A.I. can muddy the issues rather than clarifying them. Is using machine learning to alter an actor's voice the same thing as substituting a Midjourney prompt for a human artist, and if so, how is that distinct from the A.I.-powered technology used to de-age Robert De Niro and Al Pacino in The Irishman? Peter Jackson's acclaimed Beatles documentary Get Back wouldn't exist without the A.I. "demixing" tools used to separate its dialogue from the din of studio recording, and less involved versions of similar tools are regularly used to clean up audio tracks and visual effects. The use of Runway AI's generative tools didn't stop Everything Everywhere All at Once from becoming a cinephile favorite, or from winning Best Picture. The companies that are pouring billions of dollars into artificial intelligence seem intent on blurring the line between generative A.I. and other uses of the technology, despite the fact that the former is both the most threatening and the most visibly flawed way to present A.I. to the general public. Most of us aren't equipped to judge how well A.I. can analyze an MRI, but we know how many fingers are on a hand and what temperature water freezes at. Not all A.I. is created equal. You can argue that The Brutalist generating concept sketches deprived a human architect of work -- although it was an architect who decided to use it, and Steven Soderbergh argues in a new interview with the Daily Beast that using ChatGPT to generate ideas is not categorically different from the way artists have always taken from those who came before them. But The Brutalist's dialogue correction isn't taking anyone's job, and if the use of digital tools to smooth out imperfections in the actors' voices makes their performances less authentic, I have bad news about virtually every modern pop song. The threat of generative A.I. especially being used to replace human labor is very real -- and if it doesn't do our jobs as well as we do, the companies pushing it will just keep at it until we get used to the inferior version. But like CGI, A.I. is, in one form or another, already in far more movies and creative products than many people realize, and if we're going to draw a line in the sand, we better know whether we've already crossed it.

The Brutalist director Brady Corbet faces backlash for AI, issues statement

One of the contenders at the 2025 Oscars now faces a major controversy. The Brutalist, one of the most championed movies of 2024, is facing backlash for its use of AI. Over the weekend, Red Shark News published an interview with editor Dávid Jancsó, who revealed The Brutalist used AI tools from the Ukrainian special Respeecher to make small tweaks to the Hungarian dialogue spoken by Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones. Jancsó also mentioned how AI was used to make the architectural designs and buildings in The Brutalist's closing sequence. Recommended Videos The AI news has sparked outrage within the film community, with some suggesting The Brutalist should be disqualified from awards contention. Director Brady Corbet released a statement to clarify the AI use, stating the actors' portrayals are "completely their own" and that the AI "preserved the authenticity" of said performances. Please enable Javascript to view this content "Adrien and Felicity's performances are completely their own," Corbet said in a statement via Deadline. "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." In the issue over the film's final sequence involving architectural blueprints, Corbet said, "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." Corbet finished with this statement: "'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." The Brutalist is now in theaters.

Netflix caught up in AI Oscars controversy alongside The Brutalist as Emilia Pérez criticized for using voice enhancement tech

The film's director, Brady Corbet, has now weighed in on the debate The nominations for the 97th Academy Awards are revealed later this week, and an AI Oscars controversy is plaguing the headlines. A report of The Brutalist using artificial intelligence is now not the only point of contention as news that Netflix's Emilia Pérez (winner of four Golden Globes) also enhanced voices with AI. Following on from yesterday's story that Best Picture frontrunner, The Brutalist, uses AI to enhance Hungarian dialogue, the film's director Brady Corbet has now weighed in on the debate, telling Deadline, "Adrien and Felicity's performances are completely their own". "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." Corbet also emphasized that this post-editing was a manual process completed by the film's sound team and Respeecher software. "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 also clarified the allegations that AI was used in the film's closing scenes. He said: "[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." The criticism directed at The Brutalist has also shone a light on Netflix's own Oscars hopeful, Emilia Pérez, a musical directed by Jacques Audiard about a cartel boss looking to retire and transition into living as a woman. In the movie, Karla Sofìa Gascón's singing voice was enhanced using AI. An interview recorded in May at Cannes Film Festival shows re-recording mixer Cyril Holtz confirm that Respeecher was used to increase Gascón's vocal range by merging it with the voice of French pop star, Camille. The controversy around AI in movies is going to continue throughout awards season with many in the film industry opposed to any use of artificial intelligence. Whether or not this impacts the chances of The Brutalist or Emilia Pérez, two of the major frontrunners for the Oscars, from picking up a major prize is yet to be seen. I for one, don't think we've heard the last of this AI Oscars controversy yet.

What is the future of AI in film?

'The Brutalist' director Brady Corbet has responded to criticism over his use of AI in his Oscar-tipped film. We speak to those fighting for and against the inclusion of AI in film. Artificial intelligence is at the centre of a new controversy facing some of the most-promising Oscar contenders this year after production members of Golden Globe-winners The Brutalist and Emilia Pérez confirmed it was used in both films to enhance performances. For the hotly-tipped The Brutalist, editor Dávid Jancsó said that he used AI to perfect lead actors Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones' Hungarian dialogue. In Emilia Pérez, re-recording mixer Cyril Holtz confirmed at Cannes last year that he improved the singing performance of lead actress Karla Sofía Gascón with AI. The Brutalist director Brady Corbet has defended the decision. "Adrien and Felicity's performances are completely their own," he said. "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." Additionally, Corbet clarified that it "was a manual process" done by both film and Respeecher teams meant 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's comments have him straddling the battle lines drawn up in recent years over film's use of AI. In 2023, for the first time since 1960 both the Writers Guild of America (WGA) and SAG-AFTRA went on strike simultaneously. In one of the longest union strikes in Hollywood's history, a key issue was studios using AI. "There was a lot of concern around the implications of AI in Hollywood and how employers might try to use it to undermine pay and working conditions," Erica Knox, senior research and policy analyst at the WGA tells Euronews Culture. The WGA and SAG-AFTRA went to the studios with proposals to protect their writers and actors from losing work to AI. Studios initially refused to negotiate on the topic, hence the strikes. By the end of the WGA strikes in late September 2023, the union had won provisions to regulate the use of AI. "What these proposals really do, at the heart of it, is they prevent employers from using AI to replace writers or lower their pay," Knox explains. AI can't be treated as if it's a human writer, meaning any contribution to - and therefore compensation by - a human writer can't be diminished by the inclusion of AI. Writers also must be informed that they are working on material that has used AI and can't be compelled to use the tool in their writing process. Similarly, the actors union SAG-AFTRA eventually negotiated in November 2023 that actors must consent directly to the use of any AI-based replica of them for a performance beyond what was originally scripted for them. While the strikes were ultimately a victory for the unions, they didn't entirely stipend studios from the use of AI in productions. It's here that the current battle of AI use in film emerges. From the WGA's standpoint, for example, much of the issue comes from the ways AI uses copyright protected material in their machine learning models. The union fought hard to create the copyright protections for writers' works, yet companies that are outside of the Hollywood system scrape that data wholesale. "We see this as a massive theft of our writers' work," Knox says. "Just generally speaking too, human creativity is a key ingredient of all the film and TV projects that we all love. Undermining that or removing human creativity means it's less meaningful and enjoyable for everyone." It's a point that was keenly felt by director duo Scott Beck and Bryan Woods when making last year's Heretic. In the film's credits, there's a line that reads: "No Generative AI was used in the making of this film". Woods told Variety that he considered AI "an algorithm jumbling a bunch of shit together and then spitting it out as art. It's not human and it's borderline theft on some level." "It's important for people to start talking about the need for human intersection in art, business and every facet of this life, because we're on the precipice of every job on planet Earth being replaced overnight. It's going to happen so fast. And it's easy for it to happen in the arts. We're in a business that is exceptionally greedy. Decisions are made for the bottom line and not for the good of the artistic process," Woods continued. On the flip-side, many studios have thrown themselves at AI tools believing them the future of the profession. In September last year, Lionsgate announced a deal with AI firm Runway to train a new model that can "augment their work". Later that month, Avatar director James Cameron joined the board of directors for Stability AI, an AI company known for its text-to-image model. Defenders of AI say that the technology has the ability to work in tandem with creatives to enhance and not subtract from people working in the arts. One such defender is British filmmaker Scott Mann. Mann has directed multiple Hollywood projects, most recently 2022's Fall. He's also the co-CEO and founder of Flawless AI, a generative AI start-up intent on revolutionising film editing. His first interest in AI was founded through seeing a terrible foreign language dub of his film Heist (also known as Bus 657). "Robert De Niro and Jefferey Dean Morgan gave great performances and seeing those ruined in the old dubbing process, I didn't realise the amount of compromises that went into that equation," Mann tells Euronews Culture. Mann sought out solutions and founded Flawless. The first product for Flawless was an AI tool that could improve the foreign dubbing process, reshaping actors' mouths and performances to fit the new language's words. That product, TrueSync, was followed up by DeepEditor. With DeepEditor, filmmakers can film normally and then "do things like edit performances together, move cameras about and do different adjustments." "That for me is like the ultimate filmmaking tool. I'll be able to make films like 10 times faster, 10 times better. That's what this has always been about," Mann explains. If this all sounds like the comments of a typical AI CEO with speed and profitability as their only motivation, Mann assures that this is all about art. "Why am I a filmmaker?" he asks. "It's because I've pursued the idea that through art you can have an impact on the human condition. And filmmaking is the most technologically advanced form of art we have today." Mann, and Flawless he argues, aren't trying to deprive anyone of the work making films. He wants it to be democratised. Filmmaking is a prohibitively expensive artform, financially and temporally. With reduced timings and costs, "you start getting into a cycle of a more investable film industry model where you can afford originality again, because we haven't been able to afford it," Mann says, echoing the common criticism that Hollywood studios have increasingly only invested in hugely expensive guaranteed bankable titles. The unions' complaints though were that these tools limit the use of creativity. From his background as a filmmaker, Mann argues tools can still help that and not just ceaselessly create derivative works. "You have to build tools that reward originality," he says. This is where one of Flawless's most interesting products comes in. Artistic Rights Treasury (ART) is a tool Flawless developed alongside the unions to build in agreements that limit the use of an actor's performance to just the production they've agreed to work on. First created before the strikes, it mirrors much of what SAG-AFTRA fought with the major studios to have. "You should own the rights to the things that are kind of going into these training models," Mann tells Euronews Culture. An actor agreeing for their performance to be used in one film shouldn't give studios the right to create other works with it. "It's all got to be handled and consented through the core owners of the materials, the original performers." Mann's artist-first approach to an AI filmmaking company feels refreshing in a landscape where tech bros gleefully applaud the potential for these tools to strip the arts of their employees. As AI improves, it's undoubtedly going to increasingly be used in films, one of the most high-tech artistic mediums.

'The Brutalist' Director Defends His Film's Use Of AI After Facing Intense Backlash

Some, including actor Ben Affleck, have defended the rising use of AI in the film industry. "AI can write you excellent imitative verse that sounds Elizabethan -- it cannot write you Shakespeare," he said in November at CNBC's Delivering Alpha investor summit. "What AI is going to do is disintermediate the more laborious, less creative, and more costly aspects of filmmaking that will allow the costs to be brought down, that will lower the barrier to entry, that will allow more voices to be heard, that will make it easier for the people [who] want to make 'Good Will Huntings' to go out and make it."