Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist has wowed audiences with its epic scope, striking cinematography, and vast runtime, but the film has also run into trouble over its use of AI to modulate the voices of its actors. A number of other films released this awards season have also been found using AI and now the Academy is reportedly considering instituting new disclosure rules for the technology.
Variety notes that machine learning tools have been used widely by recent films and that the Academy is considering making optional disclosure rules mandatory. The outlet reports:
The Academy currently offers an optional disclosure form for AI use, but Governors and Branch executive committees are now investigating how AI is used in each branch with an eye toward making disclosure mandatory in the 2026 Oscars rules, which are expected to be published in April.
The Brutalist is about the fictional László Tóth, a Jewish architect from Hungary who survives a Nazi concentration camp and, after the conclusion of WWII, travels to America, where he becomes entangled with the dealings of a wealthy business magnate. News of the movie’s use of AI tools came to the surface shortly after the film was nominated for ten Oscars. The controversy was spurred by an interview that the film’s editor, Dávid Jancsó, gave to RedShark News. Jancśo explained that the production had actually hired the Ukrainian software company Respeecher to make the film’s actors sound like they had authentic Hungarian accents. The film also apparently used AI to create some of the architectural blueprints that appear in the film.
“It is controversial in the industry to talk about AI, but it shouldn’t be,” Jancsó told the outlet. “We should be having a very open discussion about what tools AI can provide us with. There’s nothing in the film using AI that hasn’t been done before. It just makes the process a lot faster. We use AI to create these tiny little details that we didn’t have the money or the time to shoot.”
AI has been a conundrum for Hollywood, and the industry doesn’t seem to know whether to ban the tools or adopt them. Last year, OpenAI headed to Hollywood in an attempt to sell studios on its video-generation technology, Sora. Martin Scorsese’s gangster epic, The Irishman, also famously attempted to use deepfake-like technologies to de-age the film’s actors for flashbacks. Despite the slow creep of new forms of automation into the filmmaking process, there has been little evidence to suggest that what audiences want is more of it in their movies.
