The Oscar nominations were released on Jan. 23 – and while most were discussing “Emilia Pérez’s” leading 13 nominations, another overlooked storyline is “The Brutalist’s” 10 nominations. “The Brutalist,” considered a small-budget movie that cost less than 10 million dollars, follows László Tóth, a Hungarian-born Jewish Holocaust survivor who emigrates to the United States. The film has received critical acclaim, referred to as “an amazing and engrossing epic” by one Guardian reviewer. However, the film has been most prominently in the news for its use of artificial intelligence.
The movie’s editor, David Jancsó, admitted that he used some AI to change the actor’s voices within the film. The use was supposedly minimal and was just used to perfect the actors’ Hungarian dialogue. Even though the actors underwent dialect training, the intent behind the AI use was to make the dialogue sound natural, even to a native.
With this year’s Oscar nominees, however, “The Brutalist” isn’t the only one using AI – “Emilia Pérez,” “A Complete Unknown” and “Dune: Part Two” are amongst films that have acknowledged AI use, and all are Best Picture nominees. “Alien: Romulus” is yet another nominee that uses AI. In these cases, many of these were for digital aspects – making a stunt double look like an actor, making all the actor’s eyes a particular shade of blue (as used for the Fremens in “Dune: Part Two”), aging and de-aging actors and “facial performance modification.”
Although these are not new in terms of editing – surely, a human would’ve sat and changed the color on every single iris of every single Fremen – it does take away value from physical effects. Before complex editing software and visual effects, movies would physically create puppets, use complex hair and makeup or find a physical solution to some of these problems. Although physical effects can be limiting, it’s an incredible show of human creativity and can add to performances when the actor is doing more than just floating in front of a green screen. With those changes already running through the community, add AI into the mix, and it’s not hard to believe that more and more movie production will be digital.
An important note is that AI, according to both Jancsó and others, isn’t being used in ways that haven’t been human-edited before. This is what makes AI so intriguing – it’s cost and time-effective in a high-cost environment. Instead of a human sitting down and editing every single actor’s eyes, AI can do it, freeing up a human to work elsewhere or simply not work at all. This saves a visual effects company hours of work.
What’s all the fuss at the Oscars? First, “Alien: Romulus” and “Dune: Part Two” have been nominated at the Oscars for Best Visual Effects. Both films used AI, and neither had to disclose it before the nominations. Rumors are going around that AI use will be required to be disclosed, but as it stands, Oscar voters will be left with AI usage unclear. The question isn’t, in these cases, if AI is incredibly efficient, but how much work did the effects team do? At this point, it’s hard to know who exactly is doing what when it comes to effects. How much is a computer, and how much is a human?
In addition, AI is growing more powerful as learning software. Just in 2023, Ryan Reynolds created a deepfake promoting Tesla. With that kind of facial and vocal recognition, the fear is that AI will begin to affect and create human performances.
Although the community remains certain that AI cannot generate a performance, it must be fed one; it may still be used to adjust facial features and, as we’ve seen with “The Brutalist,” adjust spoken word. Both Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones, who had their Hungarian dialogue edited, are nominated for performance awards. Although the changes in this case were minor, the question is: what’s to stop AI? It will just keep growing.
As long as it remains the most time-effective method of creating visual effects, or editing voices, AI will continue to be used throughout filmmaking. The ability to control and manipulate AI could become as important as experience in any editing software. AI will change the film industry, although it isn’t clear if it’s for better or worse.