director Brady Corbets stunning recent film, The brutalisthas won three Golden Globes and, despite winning one, stays the frontrunner at this yr's Oscars Controversy over using AI which broke out this week. (The film received 10 Oscar nominations, including for Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actor.) The growing backlash centers on whether the film must have used AI to do the Hungarian accents of its star Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones to enhance.
Many of today's actors are great at accents – like American Renée Zellweger's perfect English in Bridget Jones, British actor Idris Elba's Baltimore accent in The Wire, or Australian Margot Robbie's utterly convincing American accent in “Barbie.”
For The Brutalist, the accent challenge Brody and Jones faced was truly brutal: the tricky vowels of the Hungarian language. It was also difficult for Brody because his mother was a Hungarian refugee who got here to the United States in 1956.
Brody's character is László Tóth (roughly pronounced Laslo Tort), a Hungarian-Jewish architect who emigrates to the United States after the Holocaust. Jones plays his wife Erzsébet (roughly Air-zhay-bet), who’s trapped in Europe. During the film's post-production, Budapest-born editor Dávid Jancsó (pronounced Daavid Yancho) was in quest of accent perfection. So he reached for an AI tool that might make Brody and Jones' accents sound convincingly Hungarian.
The controversy surrounding this decision is surprising since it is nothing recent. I used to be Exploring the creative use of AI been making movies for six years. Recently, the best advances have been made in voice AI. Voice cloning technology has been abused, resulting in outrage over unlicensed voice replicas of Jennifer Aniston, Scarlett Johansson and David Attenborough. But “The Brutalist” made only minor changes to 2 actors’ voices — and with consent — which is hardly shocking by comparison.
My research included interviews with Alex Serdiuk, CEO of the voice cloning company, Repwho worked on The Brutalist. Two years ago, Serdiuk told me concerning the accent tools they were developing. He is Ukrainian but speaks excellent English together with his native accent. Listening to my voice, he said that with Respeecher's recent AI tool, “we're mainly capable of make you speak with my accent. I can be your accent donor.”
The technology could even help U.S. actors working on a British production who lack Renée Zellweger's accent skills: “We can just take her performance in American English and put a Royal British accent over it,” says Serdiuk. This was the AI tool that Dávid Jancsó utilized in The Brutalist, applying his own Hungarian vowels and consonants to Brody and Jones.
Respeecher has been working with Hollywood for years. For 2020's The Mandalorian, the corporate used AI to create the younger voice of Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill was 68 on the time of filming). In last yr's Robbie Williams biopic Better Man (directed by Michael Gracey), Respeecher helped create Williams' voice for his CGI chimpanzee avatar.
So what's the issue with The Brutalist? The big issue here is transparency. Nobody likes to feel deceived, and this backlash comes after American viewers watched the film without knowing it. We have already learned the teachings from transparency with the documentary in 2021. Road runnersa movie concerning the celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain, who died in 2018.
Oscar-winning director Morgan Neville used voice cloning and didn't tell anyone about it – until his audience discovered that a sequence during which Bourdain reads his own email couldn't have happened. Viewers felt deceived (Neville told critics that there have been other moments within the film where he did it too, but wouldn't say where). Dávid Jancsó's use of AI in The Brutalist is minuscule as compared, however the response it has provoked is, once more, as a consequence of keeping the audience at the hours of darkness.
Transparency is of utmost importance in generative AI. Technology can deceive us so easily that public trust is barely possible through full disclosure. The principle is an element of the British government current advice as regards to copyright and artificial intelligence.
Martin Adams is co-founder of MetaphysicAI, the corporate that performed the deepfake aging and de-aging of Tom Hanks and Robin Wright for the recent film Here. At a hearing last month, he told Parliament's Culture, Media and Sport Committee: “We ought to be given information before, during and after disclosure. This will give audiences the trust and transparency meaning AI will be used for the appropriate things and we're not getting all worked up and talking about misleading people.”
In parallel, one other trend is developing: full disclosure that AI was utilized in the production of a movie. Scott Beck and Bryan Woods are the administrators of Hugh Grant's latest psychological horror film, Heretic. They decided to put an announcement within the film's credits: “No generative AI was utilized in the making of this film.”
The filmmakers are a part of a powerful negative response to AI of their industry. Woods is offended concerning the increasing use of technology, saying, “I feel that the concept that an algorithm can just scrape all of human history and art from the web, repackage it, spit it back out, spit it out, and another person can use that.” Creating profit… I don’t know why that is legal.”
His statement illustrates the emotions AI evokes within the film business. It's this intensity of response that might end Brady Corbet's Oscar hopes. The controversy definitely pleases The Brutalist's competitors.
But the careful use of voice AI in post-production isn't the explanation for Adrien Brody's stellar performance, which deserved a Golden Globe and perhaps even an Oscar. Nor should it diminish the creative achievements of the various human talents involved within the making of this extraordinary film.
