In 2021, Peter Jackson made headlines with Get Back, a Beatles documentary that cleverly employed artificial intelligence to refine previously indecipherable audio. The tech community rallied in applause, yet the common populace appeared largely indifferent. However, the public sentiment towards the usage of AI in media creation has seen significant shifts over time. Earlier this year, news about the AI-aided production process of Brady Corbet’s creation, The Brutalist, was met with anything from dismissive skepticism to outright disdain on the internet.
The uproar emerged from a conversation with the movie’s editor, Dávid Jancsó, with RedShark News, where he described the usage of a tool known as Respeecher. This AI-powered voice-cloning program was used to finesse the Hungarian dialogues of Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones. ‘The goal was not to replace their performances, but to make minor modifications to specific sounds that non-Hungarians often struggle with,’ explained Jancsó.
Beyond its contributions to speech refinement, AI also played a hand in the film’s aesthetic. RedShark News reported that generative AI was utilised to produce architectural illustrations for the film’s closing scene – a triumphant event for the movie’s titular Brutalist at the Venice Biennale.
The negative reception of AI’s application in The Brutalist marked a broader trend. Following Get Back, a substantial group of people, particularly those with an interest in highly intellectual subjects such as architecture (also the movie’s central theme), expressed increasing disdain for artificial intelligence. AI, once a buzzword of potential and progress, seemed to elicit fear and mistrust.
Indeed, the AI landscape is vast and includes techniques such as machine learning, which identifies patterns, and generative AI, which generates content based on existing data. These technologies have been responsible for a surge of poorly crafted, AI-produced content and even misleading information generated by new systems, such as Google’s AI Overviews.
Furthermore, the environmental toll of operating sprawling data centers necessary for these AI systems has escalated the criticism. For many, by 2025, generative AI was perceived as not only aesthetically displeasing but also ethically dubious. It was considered as a menace that undermined the human spirit and its creative potential, seeming to contaminate every sphere it invaded.
The ripples of discontent further led to the misconception that all AI tools conjure the same harms as generative AI. This became evident in 2023, when an unreleased track from the Beatles, “Now and Then,” went into circulation, thanks to Jackson’s use of AI for remastering an old demo recording. Many presumed mistakenly that the song was wholesale output of AI.
Similar confusion arose around The Brutalist. As details from Jancsó’s interview began reaching the masses, critical information was either misconstrued or made assumptions about. It resulted in an assumption that all of Brody’s Hungarian dialogue and all aesthetic art in the film was solely the work of AI.
Adding to the storm were reports of other films also employing the Respeecher tool. For instance, Emilia Pérez and Maria used it to enhance their actors’ singing performances. But while ReSpeecher utilizes generative AI, there were no overt ethical violations found in its use within The Brutalist, especially as Brody and Jones provided express consent for their vocal performances to be adjusted using Jancsó’s own accent.
There was, however, less clarity surrounding the authenticity of the architectural drawings. A 2022 interview with the Brutalist production designer Judy Becker in Filmmaker magazine indicated that Griffin Frazen, the architecture consultant, used Midjourney to draft three Brutalist buildings rapidly. Yet Brady Corbet countered that assertion, steadfastly claiming that all the building sketches were purely human creations.
Corbet opined that AI was only employed to generate ‘images designed to appear like subpar digital drafts circa 1980’ for a video displayed during the epilogue. The distributor further explained that AI merely created two images presented as digital imprints in the video, while the rest of the featured sketches were entirely human-made.
The Brutalist, with its theme of illustrating the power of human creativity and its use of a seldom used format, VistaVision, risked damage from any association with AI. Despite the logistical challenges involved in filming a movie like this within a budget of reportedly under $10 million, the decision to utilise generative AI could be perceived as inconsistent with its main narrative.
The employment of AI tools, especially in a context where the narrative revolves around celebrating the raw potency of human innovation, conjured intense debates around AI ethics. This raised questions about the integrity of the fictional character, László Tóth’s work and the wider ramifications of AI use.