No one wants to admit that Artificial Intelligence (AI) is creeping into mainstream filmmaking faster every day, but as awards season heats up, it’s becoming ever clearer that AI is here to stay — and is even being used for potential Oscar contenders.
News of AI enhancing parts of the film, The Brutalist, is causing fans everywhere to rethink their favorite cinema choices from the past year.
“The Brutalist utilizing AI = I am no longer a Brady Corbet Stan,” posted @PoorOldRoloTony on X, referencing the film’s director. The post, from Jan. 19., 2025, has over 12K likes, indicating that others feel similarly about the director’s controversial editing choices.
“There will be people who will defend this choice due to budgetary or time constraints, but make no mistake,” @PoorOldRoloTony wrote in a follow-up post. “This is how the dam is broken. A little forgiveness here or there just props the door open for occasional use. It is important to be absolutist on this issue.”
What is The Brutalist about?
The Brutalist, a film about a fictitious Hungarian Jewish architect and his rise to fame, won big at the Golden Globes, including Best Motion Picture – Drama, Best Performance by a Male Actor in a Motion Picture – Drama (Adrien Brody), and Best Director – Motion Picture (Brady Corbet).
However, an interview with Dávid Jancsó, the film’s editor, for Red Shark News explained that The Brutalist, shot almost entirely on celluloid film, could not have come to life without help from AI.
Jancsó explained that AI was used to enhance voices and dialogue to make the main characters sound more authentically Hungarian, which included manipulation of his voice to fill in the gaps.
“Most of their Hungarian dialogue has a part of me talking in there,” Jancsó explains. “…We had so much dialogue in Hungarian that we really needed to speed up the process otherwise we’d still be in post.”
Architectural elements, including buildings and sketches used by the fictional main character, were also brought to life with help from GenAI. “There’s nothing in the film using AI that hasn’t been done before,” Jancsó justifies. “We use AI to create these tiny little details that we didn’t have the money or the time to shoot.”
Corbet addressed the controversy in a statement to Deadline, explaining that AI was used in post-production to correct Brody and co-star Felicity Jones “Hungarian language dialogue”:
“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.”
Why are people mad over The Brutalist using AI?
While it may be true, those honest details didn’t sit well with social media critics who lambasted the film soon after.
Some pointed out that it wasn’t fair for an actor, even a previous Oscar-winning one, to get a nomination for Best Actor if AI was used to enhance their voice.
“My take on The Brutalist AI thing is it’s a slippery slope to award Adrian Brody knowing his accent was edited with AI,” said X user @midsommarz, in a post that received over 11K likes, 832 reposts, and 283.1K views. “IMO altering a performance with AI like that should automatically disqualify someone from these awards shows.
X user @timmyswift13 compared the film’s AI voice enhancements to similar controversial work found in Emilia Perez (for Spanish language correction), while X user @GuadagninoFilms drastically admitted, “If Adrien Brody wins with his AI ENHANCED Hungarian accent I will kill myself in front of the Academy,” and posting a screenshot of quotations from the RedShark News interview.
Jancsó alluded to AI saving the film a lot of cash, but others were quick to point out that also meant it cost the film industry a lot of job opportunities.
“it rocks that the answer to ‘How did he make The Brutalist for under 10 million’ is just ‘no one got paid’,” posted @yourtugboatcapn in an X post with over 800.9K views, 21K likes and 1.3K resposts.
Still, some came to The Brutalist’s defense, arguing that AI is the future of filmmaking, whether fans like it or not.
X user @ElMuchacho777 replied to @yourtugboatcapn saying, “I’m sorry, but it was clearly used as a tool. The movie is still very much artistic and authorial.”
X user @mebenstein7 also brought up the point that Hollywood has always depended on alterations and hacks in order to bring movies to life.
“How is different from other techniques and enchantments like Makeup, Costume, traditional voice alteration?” they posted in response to @midsommarz’s viral post.
The Daily Dot reached out to LUX Artists (representing Dávid Jancsó) via email and @PoorOldRoloTony via X direct message and comment.
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