AI Makes it to the Cinema

Colby Brooke

Artificial intelligence (AI) has now found its way into cinema and one of the biggest movies of the year: The Brutalist, has utilized its power. But it’s not what people think. AI was only used to help tweak and edit certain aspects of language accents and to help speed up the overall post-production process.   

The Brutalist starring Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones had a total of 10 Academy Award nominations. When people found out that AI was used in the production of the film they lost their minds completely. 

According to Scott Roxborough of The Hollywood Reporter, That AI was used in the film in any form has sparked online outrage, with many suggesting it should disqualify it for awards consideration.   

This a crazy solution for a movie that used AI in such a minimal way. It’s not like the entire movie was fabricated by AI and then shown to the world. It was only used in assistance.

In a statement given by Brady Corbet to The Hollywood Reporter, he explained that Adrien and Felicity’s performances are completely their own. Corbet went on saying: they worked for months with dialect coach Tanera Marshall to perfect their accents. Innovative Respeecher technology was used in Hungarian language dialogue editing only.

No English 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. Per Roxborough of The Hollywood Reporter.   

Both Brody and Jones were nominated for Oscars with Brody winning “Best Actor in a leading role,” and Jones nominated for “Best Actress in a supporting role.” Jones however did not win. But the night was not over for The Brutalist as it took home an award for best cinematography and best music. All the while, people online were still hyper-focused on the fact that the editors used AI.   

The film’s editor Dávid Jancsó explained the difficulty of learning and pronouncing Hungarian in this manner. “I am a native Hungarian speaker and I know that it is one of the most difficult languages to learn to pronounce,” he explained. He went on to say, if you’re coming from the Anglo-Saxon world certain sounds can be particularly hard to grasp. Per Roxborough of The Hollywood Reporter.  

This is all a big misunderstanding; actors should have every advantage possible to make their performance perfect or as close to it. At the end of the day the world is moving so quick technologically that movies are eventually going to be assisted by AI more and more.

This is just scratching the surface. If the AI is controlled and managed by film editors there is nothing to worry about. If it is controlled and used properly people shouldn’t freak out and be so quick to judge.