Gold Rush: Nate Jones

Ghost in the Machinations The Brutalist, AI, and awards-season skulduggery.

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WHEN PETER JACKSON'S Beatles documentary, Get Back, debuted in 2021, the fact that Jackson had used artificial intelligence to clean up previously unusable audio was greeted with enthusiasm from tech geeks and crickets from most everyone else. But a lot has changed over the past few years, and when the story broke in mid-January that Brady Corbet's The Brutalist had used AI behind the scenes, reactions on social media ranged from "I'm afraid The Brutalist can kiss my arse" and "Get fucked" to simply "Evil."

The controversy sprang from an interview the film's editor, Dávid Jancsó, gave to an outlet called RedShark News in which he spoke of using an AI voice-cloning tool, Respeecher, to tweak Adrien Brody's and Felicity Jones's Hungarian dialogue. "If you're coming from the Anglo-Saxon world certain sounds can be particularly hard to grasp," Jancsó said. "We were very careful about keeping their performances. It's mainly just replacing letters here and there." Additionally, RedShark News reported that the film had used generative AI "to conjure a series of architectural drawings" for the movie's epilogue, which takes place at a careerachievement ceremony for the titular Brutalist at the Venice Biennale.