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

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.

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.”

– Sonia Rao, The Washington Post