Hollywood's latest AI experiment isn't another deepfake or sea of digital extras. It's a tweak to human voices. In the Oscar-nominated film The Brutalist, actors had their foreign dialogue improved by artificial intelligence, raising concerns about the technology's growing role in filmmaking — and in our lives.
The Brutalist follows a Hungarian-Jewish architect who survives the Holocaust, escaping postwar Europe to settle in America and rebuilding his life, career, and marriage. In the film, lead actors Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones speak partially in Hungarian with Jewish accents, which is where the use of AI comes in. The movie's editor, Dávid Jancsó, recently told industry publication Red Shark News that he used an AI tool called Respeecher to make portions of the Hungarian dialogue sound more authentic.
"Most of their Hungarian dialogue has a part of me talking in there," Jancsó, a native Hungarian speaker, said. "We were very careful about keeping their performances. It's mainly just replacing letters here and there."
The recent admission caused a major debate among film industry professionals, especially with The Brutalist sweeping award nominations this season. Brody and Jones are both nominated for Oscars for their respective roles, and the film is in the running for best picture.
Industry experts say The Brutalist isn't the first — and won't be the last — movie to use AI in its filmmaking. In fact, editors of Emilia Pérez, a film also nominated for a slew of Oscars including best picture, recently admitted to using AI to enhance the singing voice of lead actor Karla Sofía Gascón. Gascón is also nominated for an Oscar for her role.
"I suspect the use of AI in production will become increasingly common and openly admitted, particularly for what might be seen as minor labor-intensive work such as generative backgrounds, crowd scenes, and the like," Louis Heaton, digital film and TV production lecturer at London Metropolitan University, told CNN.
Heaton credits AI's popularity with the tech being "cheaper and quicker" for production studios. Jancsó cited the same reasoning for using Respeecher in The Brutalist.
"It is controversial in the industry to talk about AI, but it shouldn't be," Jancsó told Red Shark News. "It just makes the process a lot faster. We use AI to create these tiny little details that we didn't have the money or the time to shoot."
AI may be an inexpensive shortcut, but the cost to the arts — and the planet — is hard to justify. AI data centers use a massive amount of electricity, which is often powered by dirty fuel. Data centers also churn through billions of gallons of freshwater, which is used to cool their equipment. Moreover, AI technology also relies on rare minerals and elements, which are often mined unethically and unsustainably, per the United Nations Environment Programme.
The demands of AI are expected to contribute to the doubling of data center power consumption from 2022 to 2026.
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"There is still much we don't know about the environmental impact of AI but some of the data we do have is concerning," said Golestan Radwan, chief digital officer of the United Nations Environment Programme, on the UNEP website. "We need to make sure the net effect of AI on the planet is positive before we deploy the technology at scale."
Not only that, but using AI to enhance acting performances could be seen as watering down the art form, taking some of the humanity out of storytelling.
As Heaton told CNN: "As AI here appears to be directly altering/improving an element of the actor's performance, it could be seen as calling into question the authenticity of that performance. Would the average moviegoer really care if the lead actors were speaking perfect Hungarian? ... I'd say no."
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