As A24’s flagship contender this awards season, The Brutalist has already cemented its place in the cultural conversation, seemingly resonating with many of the guilds and award boards across the world. Its success underscores the power of bold, auteur-driven storytelling and serves as a testament to the creative heights that can be achieved even with constrained resources.
However, one of the ways that they have maintained this small budget is by utilising publicly available tools and taking advantage of one of the biggest growing ones – AI, specifically Generative AI, which is famously critiqued due to the way it functions, which is by learning from already existing art created by real artists and replicating and crafting these into something new.
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In a new interview with editor Dávid Jancsó for RedSharkNews, he revealed that AI was used for two parts of the production process on the film: for assisting in helping the actors sound more Hungarian with AI enhancements to their voice, and using it to create an entire scene towards the end of the movie to showcase a variety of drawings.
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Many people have already argued that relying on generative AI for such an important moment in The Brutalist diminishes the craftsmanship and human creativity that audiences expect in a film centered on architecture, considering that it involves a field deeply rooted in artistic vision and individuality. The use of AI here has sparked debates about the ethics of automation in art and cinema, particularly as it pertains to projects that pride themselves on being deeply personal or auteur-driven.
Adding fuel to the fire, the proud claims of a low budget now feel disingenuous, as it was not achieved by creative ingenuity as implied but rather morally dubious shortcuts. However, the reliance on AI shortcuts now casts that achievement in a different light, with many seeing it as a cost-cutting measure that compromises the film’s authenticity. For a movie centered on an architect’s vision and legacy, the use of AI to simulate the protagonist’s creations feels antithetical to the story’s core themes and message.
Seems like they fine tuned the voices to sound more authentic. Hungarian is a hard accent to do from what I understand and it’s not possible to fine tune voices without ai. They also used gen ai on one scene.
Apparently, the line between art and garbage is how it’s made.
Yeah no that’s the difference between craft and craft. Confusion about that is ripe both within the pro- and anti-AI crowd, on the one hand you have people who get dazzled by the results of their “big boobiez plz” prompting, not able to judge the resulting image even if they tried to, on the other side you have people taking on “big boobiez plz” commissions not realising that their derivative style, by-the-numbers composition, everything, is slop. Hand-made slop is still slop.
You can value craft for its own sake and that’s fine and proper but please don’t confuse it with art or I shall be referencing urinals on pedestals.