Commentary: AI voice tech used in The Brutalist is nothing new – the backlash is about transparency

READING, England: Director Brady Corbet’s stunning new film, The Brutalist, has won three Golden Globes and remains a frontrunner for this year’s Oscars despite a controversy over its use of artificial intelligence (AI) which erupted this week. (The film has received 10 Oscar nominations, including best film, best director and best actor.) 

The growing backlash centres on whether the film should have used AI to improve the Hungarian accents of its stars, Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones.

Many of today’s actors are superb at delivering accents – like American Renee Zellweger’s perfect English in Bridget Jones, or British actor Idris Elba’s Baltimore accent in The Wire or Australian Margot Robbie’s utterly convincing American accent in Barbie.

For The Brutalist, the accent challenge faced by Brody and Jones was truly brutal: The tricky vowel sounds of the Hungarian language. It was even difficult for Brody, whose mother was a Hungarian refugee who arrived in the US in 1956.

Brody’s character is Laszlo Toth (roughly pronounced Laslo Tort), a Hungarian-Jewish architect who emigrates to the United States after the Holocaust. Jones plays his wife, Erzsebet (roughly Air-zhay-bet), trapped back in Europe. 

During the film’s post-production, the Budapest-born editor, David Jancso (pronounced Daavid Yancho), was looking for accent perfection. So he reached for an AI tool that could make Brody’s and Jones’s accents sound convincingly Hungarian.

The controversy over this decision is surprising because it’s nothing new. I have been researching the creative use of AI in filmmaking for the past six years. Recently, the biggest progress has been in voice AI. 

Voice cloning technology has been misused, causing outrage over unlicensed vocal replicas of Jennifer Aniston, Scarlett Johansson and David Attenborough. But The Brutalist made just tiny alterations to two actors’ voices – and with consent – which in comparison is hardly shocking.