January 21, 2025 - 4:00pm

The new Oscar-nominated epic The Brutalist follows a visionary architect who flees the Holocaust and rebuilds his life in America. Its major themes concern creative integrity and the difficulty of making art. But the film’s use of AI, in the eyes of some critics and cinephiles, has undermined what could have been this year’s finest new release.

According to the film’s editor Dávid Jancsó in a recent interview, the production used an AI programme, Respeecher, in a two-minute segment to aid the Hungarian pronunciation of actors Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones. The purpose of this was to enhance authenticity, as Hungarian is an “extremely unique language” which is very hard for English speakers to master. Going further, generative AI was also used in a sequence depicting a series of architectural drawings and finished projects in the brutalist style of the fictional protagonist László Tóth.

The controversy sparked by The Brutalist reveals a wider anxiety among artists and audiences who feel that AI will be used to replace humans in the production process. The 2023 Hollywood writers’ strike was a good example of this.

The film industry has always latched onto the latest technological developments: Technicolor, digital cameras, CGI, motion-capture technology. All of these have allowed filmmakers to do novel things which were previously impossible or prohibitively expensive. From the animated opening sequence of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo in 1958 to more recent films such as Avatar which are almost wholly CGI, the film industry has been obsessed by the revolution in special effects for over 60 years. Lord of the Rings and Saving Private Ryan, for example, used CGI to represent respectively the supernatural and the drama of modern warfare in a more convincing manner than would have been possible under the technological limits of previous decades.

It is therefore inevitable that the industry would incorporate AI into its projects, especially to cut costs and save time. It’s quixotic to expect film studios and directors to abstain out of notions of artistic purity. The argument, then, is about how AI should be used in film, not whether it has a place at all.

If AI is used as a supplementary tool to polish off certain aspects of the editing process, such as sound design, then there is nothing egregious about it. It can even enhance the work while making the production process more efficient. AI machine learning was used to help create the face of Thanos in Avengers: Infinity War. AI allows independent filmmakers already working under tight budgets to do things at a higher technical level, which would otherwise require budgets they don’t have.

But there is a major problem if, or maybe when, AI becomes the dominant tool in filmmaking — where the artist isn’t the master of this technology, but has instead been supplanted by it. In such a scenario, filmmaking will be degraded by corporations: art and entertainment will degenerate into mere “content”. Even worse, AI can be deployed by corporations to seize an artist’s idea or use an actor’s voice, image and likeness, then adapt it and use it in their films without having to pay them. Disney has already been caught scanning the likenesses of background actors without their consent so that they can use them as “digital extras” in the future. It is a horrible premonition of a less human, more exploitative world coming into existence.

Fundamental to the creative process is making choices and judgements in order to convey meaning. It is this human touch that makes something artistic. Algorithms can’t make judgements like a human can, which is why AI-generated films would be utterly bland and lead to a barren cinematic landscape. It doesn’t mean that there should be an allergy to AI in film. But in order for it to be effective, the film industry must understand that AI is a tool dependent on human influence rather than the other way round. For nothing, not even the most sophisticated form of artificial intelligence, can adequately replace the human eye — and certainly not the human imagination.


Ralph Leonard is a British-Nigerian writer on international politics, religion, culture and humanism.

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