AI-Pocalypse Now- The Brutalist on Trial: Guilty of… Sound Design?

Over the last few weeks, something has been heating up Hollywood even more than the relentless LA wildfires. A whisper that ignited into a full-blown inferno: the controversy surrounding the alleged use of AI in some Oscar-nominated films. What started as a murmur has now become a self-righteous crusade to banish AI from cinema altogether, never mind the actual artistic merits of the films in question. On trial? Maria, Emilia Perez, and The Brutalist. While Maria and Emilia Perez employed artificial intelligence to fine-tune their lead actors’ singing voices, polishing their performances in line with their heavily music-driven narratives, The Brutalist finds itself facing a whole different level of scrutiny.

Editor Dávid Jancsó proudly revealed in an interview that, in pursuit of perfection, he used an AI-powered Ukrainian voice synthesiser, Respeecher, to make subtle tweaks to the brief lead actors’ Hungarian dialogues. Star Adrien Brody, despite his Hungarian heritage and extensive training with a dialect coach, still didn’t sound 100% native. So, in the few non-English moments, some vowels were adjusted, barely perceptibly, to enhance authenticity. And yet, this tiny tweak has thrown The Brutalist into the AI bonfire, as if the actors somehow “cheated”. Let’s put things in perspective: Hungary accounts for approximately 0.5% of the film’s total box office revenue. The vast majority of the audience, 99.5% of viewers, wouldn’t have even noticed. But director Brady Corbet, ever the perfectionist, wanted his film to feel real to everyone, down to the last syllable. And here’s the kicker: had they simply called it ‘enhanced sound design’, the same zealots currently tarnishing the film’s reputation might well have nominated it for an Oscar instead.

As Corbet himself put it:

“Adrien and Felicity’s performances are completely their own. They worked for months with dialect coach Tanera Marshall to perfect their accents… The aim was to preserve the authenticity of Adrien and Felicity’s performances in another language, not to replace or alter them, and it was done with the utmost respect for the craft.”

Which leads me to ponder… What exactly constitutes a performance? What makes it great? Is it an actor’s ability to channel emotion, or the flawless pronunciation of a few tricky vowels? If an actor is allowed a stunt double for action sequences, why is it suddenly sacrilegious to tweak a minor phonetic detail? In The Godfather Part II, Robert DeNiro might sound Italian, but he surely doesn’t speak it. Yet, his performance as a young Vito Corleone has never been questioned. And if you’ve seen The Brutalist, you wouldn’t question Adrien Brody’s one either.

The real issue here isn’t AI—it’s ignorance. In Hollywood, AI has become a blasphemous term, a digital bogeyman lurking in the shadows, waiting to steal jobs and dismantle the industry. After months of strikes against AI-driven automation, any mention of its use triggers immediate outrage. No context, no nuance: if AI was involved, it must be cancelled. Respeecher didn’t replace any workers, it led to more jobs in the film. If we refuse to accept this level of ‘enhanced sound design’, because, let’s be honest, that’s exactly what it is, then why do we embrace the digital help of CGI? Cinema is, by nature, an illusion, and its goal is to captivate and entertain. If a single sound risks pulling an audience out of that illusion, it is the filmmaker’s duty to fix it and deliver a better product, the best possible version of it. Was there similar resistance when the first filmmakers dared to use artificial lighting instead of natural sunlight?

I genuinely hope people start considering context before passing harsh judgment, that common sense prevails, and that The Brutalist triumphs at the upcoming Academy Awards. So, to those trembling at the mere mention of AI: you have nothing to fear- there’s no intelligence to replace to begin with.