There is yet another A.I. controversy in Hollywood. However, this new one affects one of the year’s most acclaimed films and a Oscar frontrunner, “The Brutalist.” But is this latest artificial intelligence brouhaha actually worthy of debate? Or is it an positive example of how the technology can be used?
This all started with a seemingly innocuous Red Shark News interview with editor Dávid Jancsó, who worked on “The Brutalist.” The editor talked about all aspects of the creation of the film. That includes the use of A.I. to help refine the Hungarian dialogue in the film.
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According to the interview, the A.I. program Respeecher was used by the production to make sure the Hungarian dialogue, specifically coming from stars Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones, sounded perfect to the ear. The editor said that they could have used other tools to do the same thing, but the A.I. helped speed things up, so they could finish the film in a reasonable amount of time. Adding to that, there were also reports that generative A.I. was used to come up with some blueprints and finished buildings in the film’s closing moments.
Now, we have filmmaker Brady Corbet speaking up and explaining when and why his film used A.I.
“Adrien and Felicity’s performances are completely their own,” said Corbet (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.”
As for the claims that A.I. was used to create certain images in the film, Corbet denies that’s the case.
“Judy Becker and her team did not use AI to create or render any of the buildings. All images were hand-drawn by artists,” he added. “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.”
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He continued, “‘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.”
It would appear the situation involving A.I. and “The Brutalist” opens up an interesting dialogue about the use of the controversial technology. Deadline’s report claims that the use of Respeecher actually created jobs on the film and didn’t lead to any job cuts. Not only that, the technology was used in such a detailed, minute way. This isn’t the same sort of situation where images were created for marketing materials or for use in the film, like we’ve seen before.
Overall, it would appear the use of A.I. in “The Brutalist” was done in a tasteful way, and it shouldn’t ruffle any feathers. However, just the idea of using A.I. is enough for some to be mad. We’ll have to see how this controversy (or lack thereof) plays out.