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High Infidelity

Against the steady creep of AI into cinema A24/The Baffler

Sunday’s Oscars ceremony was a productive night for The Brutalist, which scooped up the statuettes for cinematography, score, and best actor. Since the film’s release late last year, the deluge of acclaim for Brady Corbet’s epic, three-and-a-half hour tale of broken bones and busted dreams in post-Holocaust America has had a distinctly revivalist slant. Critics have praised both the expansiveness of the film’s vision—a return of sorts for Hollywood to grand Golden Age themes of exile, will, belonging, and loss—and its reinvigoration of several dormant photographic and narrative techniques: the intermission, the stock postwar character of the rich American jerk in Europe, and VistaVision, the widescreen format on which the feature was shot.

But The Brutalist’s most intriguing and controversial technical feature points forward rather than back: in January, the film’s editor Dávid Jancsó revealed that he and Corbet used tools from AI speech software company Respeecher to make the Hungarian-language dialogue spoken by Adrien Brody (who plays the protagonist, Hungarian émigré architect László Tóth) and Felicity Jones (who plays Tóth’s wife Erzsébet) sound more Hungarian. In response to the ensuing backlash, Corbet clarified that the actors worked “for months” with a dialect coach to perfect their accents; AI was used “in Hungarian language dialogue editing only, specifically to refine certain vowels and letters for accuracy.” In this way, Corbet seemed to suggest, the production’s two central performances were protected against the howls of outrage that would have erupted from the world’s 14 million native Hungarian speakers had The Brutalistmade it to screens with Brody and Jones playing linguistically unconvincing Magyars. Far from offending the idea of originality and authorship in performance, AI in fact savedBrody and Jones from committing crimes against the Uralic language family; I shudder even to imagine how comically inept their performances might have been without this technological assist, a catastrophe of fumbled agglutinations, misplaced geminates, and amateur-hour syllable stresses that would have no doubt robbed The Brutalistof much of its awards season élan.

This all seems a little silly, not to say hypocritical. Defenders of this slimy deception claim the use of AI in film is no different than CGI or automated dialogue replacement, tools commonly deployed in the editing suite for picture and audio enhancement. But CGI and ADR don’t tamper with the substance of a performance, which is what’s at issue here. Few of us will have any appreciation for the corrected accents in The Brutalist: as is the case, I imagine, for most of the people who’ve seen the film, I don’t speak Hungarian. But I do speak bullshit, and that’s what this feels like. This is not to argue that synthetic co-pilots and assistants of the type that have proliferated in recent years hold no utility at all. Beyond the creative sector, AI’s potential and applications are limitless, and the technology seems poised to unleash a bold new era of growth and optimization. AI will enable smoother reductions in headcount by giving managers more granular data on the output and sentiment of unproductive workers; it will allow loan sharks and crypto scammers to get better at customer service; it will offer health insurance companies the flexibility to more meaningfully tie premiums to diet, lifestyle, and sociability, creating billions in savings; it will help surveillance and private security solution providers improve their expertise in facial recognition and gait analysis; it will power a revolution in effective “pre-targeting” for the Big Pharma, buy-now-pay-later, and drone industries. Within just a few years advances like these will unlock massive productivity gains that we’ll all be able to enjoy in hell, since the energy-hungry data centers on which generative AI relies will have fried the planet and humanity will be extinct.

So much for business; what about art? The Brutalist’s AI touch-up fits the broader culture’s fetishization of perfection and flattening, but image filters and technologies like Auto-Tune consciously draw attention to their artificiality, almost making a virtue of it, which is not at all the case with the film’s deployment of AI. The modifications overseen by Jancsó and Corbet don’t directly offend the senses the way regular AI art does, since they’re defined by their absences: instead, it’s the idea of the technology’s application that rankles, and the film is tainted by association. A work that tries so hard to be viewed as important cinema feels suddenly hollow in retrospect, and certain scenes—in particular, the one where László’s wealthy patron stumbles over the pronunciation of “Erzsébet”—now read as straightforwardly cynical. AI seems poised to decimate the voice acting industry; how long will it be before filmmakers give up on the whole time-wasting business of dialect coaching and language research and toss their performers’ untrained vocalizations directly into the linguistic Instant Pot? Corbet’s stated aim in applying Respeecher was “to preserve the authenticity of Adrien and Felicity’s performances in another language”—to make their accents, in other words, more authentic. But authentic to what? Plasticized authenticity is no authenticity. The Brutalistis a fiction, whatever the resemblances between Tóth’s character and modernist architect Marcel Breuer, and like all fictions it has the freedom to be as inauthentic as it pleases. The filmmakers’ recourse to corrective AI is not like the use of gut-string instruments in classical music or the design of Shakespeare’s Globe in London, which claim fidelity to the traditions of pre-Romantic orchestration and Elizabethan theatre, respectively; it’s a filmmaking prosthesis that cheats the viewer and cheapens the performances.

It’s also, in some ways, filmically illiterate. What damage would it have done to The Brutalisthad Brody and Jones been allowed to detonate their Hungarian on the audience uncorrected? No non-Hungarian ever lost critical or intellectual respect for failing to master the Hungarian language, a famously difficult tongue. Besides, the history of cinema is replete with bad accents that did nothing to dent the greatness of the performances to which they were attached. Russell Crowe played Master and Commander’s Captain Jack Aubrey in the voice of an Australian rugby league player ten Carlton Draughts deep at the Coogee Bay Hotel; inThe Last Temptation of Christ, Harvey Keitel’s Judas sounded like he’d pitched up in Galilee straight from the Bronx. These films arguably gained in depth and universality for the “inauthenticity” of their performers’ accents; indeed, Martin Scorsese explained the mishmash of pronunciations among The Last Temptation’s Twelve Apostles as a deliberate directorial strategy to highlight the characters’ timeless humanity.

The Brutalist’s use of AI might, on a very generous reading, recall postwar Italian cinema’s tradition of motor-only shooting, which involved capturing solely the picture on set and overdubbing the dialogue afterwards; this is the “cheat” that allowed so many foreign actors, few of whom could speak Italian, to act in films produced in Italy during the decades that followed the war. But the dubbing of that era was obvious to the viewer, and the constraints it imposed turned out to be richly generative. Eventually the friction between image and sound became a narrative tool in its own right, literalizing the sense of alienation and crisis central to the work of filmmakers like Michelangelo Antonioni, Dario Argento, and even neorealists like Luchino Visconti: far from limiting the horizon of performance, dubbing enriched Burt Lancaster’s portrayal of Don Fabrizio in Visconti’s The Leopardby showing the Sicilian nobleman as a man out of sync with the times, his lips perpetually half a beat behind his words. Thanks to AI, modern filmmakers are now freed, at least in part, from the sense of representational limits that constrained their predecessors; disappearing with those former boundaries, perhaps, will be the resourcefulness and experimentation that created so many aesthetic breakthroughs during the pre-digital era.   

The flaws and idiosyncrasies of performance are part of cinema’s charm, its capacity to surprise. We all enjoy it when actors nail a foreign language or accent: one thinks of Meryl Streep as Lindy Chamberlain in A Cry in the Dark, all upward inflections and squeaking diphthongs, or Leonardo DiCaprio’s pitch-perfect Rhodesian gemstone smuggler in Blood Diamond, or Robert De Niro chomping through syllables in The Godfather: Part II’s Sicilian dialect scenes. But it can be equally enjoyable when actors don’t (see any film set in America that stars Nicole Kidman). The problem with The Brutalistis that viewers—savvy, Hungarian-speaking viewers mostly, but in theory all of us—are stripped of the ability to construct their appraisal independently, since the foreign language accents in the film are all already perfect. Applied more broadly, this kind of anti-wabi-sabi has the potential to make movie-watching less fun, replacing active critical engagement with a drab appreciation of machine-managed flawlessness, and acting less interesting. It also betrays the very premise on which dense, mythological filmmaking with aspirations to capital-m Meaning—a category to which The Brutalist, with its elephantine symbolism, slightly vapid literary allusions, and ambitious attempt to marry Sebaldian irresolution to Randian monumentality, clearly belongs—is built: that acting is method, a craft, a struggle, and each actor’s performance an expression of individual skill. “Adrien and Felicity’s performances are completely their own,” Corbet has argued. Only, they’re not. Brody and Jones’s performances may now be authentic to spoken Hungarian, but they’re no longer authentic to themselves: at least in the parts of the film with Hungarian dialogue, the acting stands more as a monument to the prowess of the voice-matching software than that of the actors. Not even actors’ actoring—the one thing that intuitively seems like it should provide refuge from the epistemic pollution and advancing brain rot promoted by AI-generated culture—is safe anymore. Jeremy Strong must be protected at all costs from this technology’s creeping evil.

“My uncle is above all a principled artist,” Tóth’s niece, Zsófia, says in The Brutalist’s coda, introducing the aging architect at the launch of a retrospective in his honor at the Venice Biennale. (Some of the “retro” digital renderings in the memorial video included in this scene were also, Corbet has admitted, produced with the help of AI.) The film’s figurational manipulations are especially jarring when you consider the substance of the story—the artist’s singular struggle to realize a vision in the face of a boorish and unfeeling culture, to create beauty amid crushing pressure to cut corners and lower his own aesthetic principles—and the nature of architectural brutalism itself, which was originally conceived as a celebration of the texture and blemishes of béton brut, the unfinished concrete that gives the style its name. An AI-smoothed brutalism, with its rough edges and warped pours all corrected, would be a contradiction in terms. The film’s technological “improvements” are also at odds with the respect Corbet wants us to give him for his own work as a visionary creator. Every frame in The Brutalistgroans with directorial intent, with the strain of a visible effort to convince us we are watching cinematic art every bit as powerful and totemic as the architecture on screen. But the actors? Well, they couldn’t nail their Hungarian vowels, so we had to rope in the AI voicebox to bring their material up to scratch. The director is the driving force of film history; performers are just limbs on a set awaiting a tune-up in post.

In the end, the debate over artistic choices made and avoided in The Brutalistmay be immaterial. What matters here is not this particular infraction but the precedent it sets, the course it establishes for culture. We already have AI up the wazoo in films like Here, which used facial effects to “de-age” Tom Hanks and Robin Wright, and several other Oscar-nominated films this year employed Respeecher, including Emilia Pérezand Dune: Part Two. But The Brutalistrepresents AI’s most meaningful incursion to date into the sanctum of Serious Cinema. Historically, technology has been a boon to creativity—and nowhere has that been more powerfully the case than in film, whose history can be read as a sequence of explorations of the possibilities latent within different apparatuses and techniques. But AI is a different beast from color film, or the Louma crane, or the hand-held camera: it’s steroidal, aesthetically corrupting, and unlike these earlier advances it confronts the filmmaker with real ethical questions. AI increasingly feels inseparable from Silicon Valley and the specific disdain the tech industry reserves for society and culture, for a body politic with needs and aspirations beyond those that feed the machines. Use implies complicity. To incorporate AI into the production of art today, no matter how sparingly or subtly, is to endorse Silicon Valley’s politics and worldview: its exploitation of both producers and “users,” its blithe indifference to the social impact of post-automation layoffs and the environmental assault of industrial data processing, its cramped and uninteresting idea of imagination, its petrification of creation. It’s a vote for the assholes. Implicitly, since the models gain strength by mastering the domain of the known, using AI to enhance art is also tantamount to an acceptance that culture has stopped, that everything is recursive and we have no fresh terrain left to explore.

A culture without imperfections is a culture without a soul. In the realm of daily experience the room to escape AI feels increasingly narrow: the tide of slop is simply too overwhelming for meaningful resistance. But artists—especially those with portentous designs on investing their creations with meaning, like Corbet—still have a choice, as does their audience. The question, to be asked out loud in a hackingly bad Hungarian accent, is this: Milyen j?v?t akarunk?How much future do we want?