“The Brutalist” is one of several recent Oscar darlings receiving controversy for its utilization of generative artificial intelligence. The film follows the fictional Hungarian-Jewish Holocaust survivor László Tóth, played by Adrien Brody, and his immigration to America to start a new life as an architect. According to an interview with the film’s editor Dávid Jancsó in Red Shark News, the filmmakers decided to employ the AI software company Respeecher to touch up the cast’s dialogue to more accurately reflect the Hungarian dialect. Jancsó states: “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. […] We […] wanted to perfect it so that not even locals will spot any difference.”
In the same interview, Jancsó mentions in unclear terms that generative AI is also used at the end of the film to help render images of Tóth’s architecture. Due to this vagueness, initial backlash was sparked by the assumption that the use of AI was more pervasive than it actually was. In a following press release, Jancsó reassures critics that the production team simply used AI “only 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 these nuanced clarifications failed to reach many of those outraged on social media, especially on X. There, viral tweet after viral tweet slammed “The Brutalist” as a deep betrayal to art. While overblown, I can’t completely disregard these reactions. I am an artist, and I am often anxious about AI’s threat to my career. Some days I want to start an anti-AI revolution and destroy every Earth-melting machine spurting out ugly images of cats in astronaut suits. In some respects, I wish I could hate “The Brutalist.” But I can’t here, because I simply do not think the social media slander is justified.
Take, as example, one tweet with 14k likes which suggests, “they used AI […] to avoid paying visual artists for their work.” “The Brutalist”’s budget is $10 million, remarkably meager for a theatrically-run film with such a star-studded cast. It seems unlikely that, without AI, they would have funded an entirely separate role for someone to edit some images in the background of one scene.”
Another tweet with 174k likes clips a Hollywood Reporter Actor’s Roundtable video. As Brody speaks on his acting method, the video cuts to Sebastian Stan giving an awkward face. Of this, the user tweets: “Of course Sebastian is disgusted. He’s from Romania, and Hungarian is one of the languages spoken there […] yet Adrian Brody and the director of THE BRUTALIST used AI to mimic Hungarian speech.” This perspective, in addition to ignoring Brody’s and Jancsó’s own Hungarian descent, reads entirely as projection to me — an attempt to force their own revulsion with AI onto Stan’s rather innocuous expression.
If you may allow me to be subjective, I think “The Brutalist” is superb. It’s striking in its imagery, inventive in its messaging, truly moving in its performances, and entirely undeserving of the backlash. It seems ironic to me that a film saying so much about the nature of art is being derided as anti-art slop.
Whether you like it or not, computers are being used to modify performances all the time. Actors’ performances are dubbed over with other actors’ dialogue, autotune is used to tweak tone and pitch, in some cases even tears are added to performers’ faces using CGI. Respeecher is no more influential: Jancsó assures, “[Respeecher is] mainly just replacing letters here and there. You can do this in ProTools yourself, but we […] needed to speed up the process otherwise we’d still be in post.”
But I don’t think you need to take Jancsó’s word for it — I think the purity of Brody’s performance is evident in “The Brutalist” itself. Brody’s performance is more than just his accent. It’s his tone, his body language, his cadence — it’s the multitudinous other things that makes a performance a performance, all of which can reasonably be called his own.
So why are people railing against Respeecher, and not against any of the aforementioned performance-modifying tools? One answer may lie in “The Brutalist”’s status as an indie film. I think we have a tendency to think of arthouse cinema as in its own, pure echelon, invulnerable to the trends of the time. But this is not the case. Indie films have always used the latest technology, especially in cases where it allows gaps to be filled in productions with smaller budgets.
Another, perhaps more relevant answer seems to lie in a growing reactionary pushback against all things AI. This pushback is not entirely without merit. There are many examples of studios using AI in ways that I feel genuinely harm the craft. Take Marvel’s “Secret Invasion”, a mini-series whose opening sequence was made almost entirely through generative AI. I think this is an instance much more amenable to criticisms of taking away artists’ jobs. “The Brutalist”’s use of AI, on the other hand, is much less severe. It fast-tracked some of the tedium of editing, while seemingly preserving the heart of the artmaking process.
So, problem solved, right? Those decrying the death of art are completely overreacting. Well, not exactly. I think we do have reason to be concerned – not because of AI, but a lack of transparency. It seems odd to me that we should first learn of the film’s AI utilization through an obscure interview with the editor, which is itself easy pickings for sensationalized clickbait headlines. I am not saying “The Brutalist” is alone in this issue of transparency, and I am unsure exactly by which means AI use should be publicized, but results reflect that this is clearly not the best way.
The most productive way forward, in my judgement, is to ask for more communication between filmmakers and audiences on how exactly AI is being utilized in a film’s production process. Perhaps if an actor’s performance is enhanced through AI, Oscar voters should be given access to the raw, unmodified performance to compare and judge. In any case, like CGI, like digital recording, like cell animation, or any other initially-lambasted technology of yore, it seems AI in film is here to stay. On some level we have to learn to be okay with that.
Now, this is where I originally meant to end this article. But there is something else I cannot shake — an odd sense of dread in my gut. A feeling that this case, while genuinely anodyne in itself, may portend bad things to come. A slippery slope into a world without art. It’s a vague sense, yes, and practically unfounded, but it’s unignorable.
Despite “The Brutalist” being a perfectly fine film with a perfectly justified use of AI, we can’t use it as an excuse to be unwary. We should always view art as a medium for telling uniquely human stories, and be critical when AI seems to be inhibiting, rather than aiding, in that process.
The final line of “The Brutalist” is delivered by László’s niece, Zsófia: “no matter what the others try and sell you, it is the destination, not the journey.” It’s undeniable that there is electricity in the air, zipping its way towards us. What is its destination? Only time will tell whether it is invigoration or annihilation.
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