Aidan: This film awards season has been a noteworthy one, with all time performances accompanied by a dramatic campaign leading up to this year's Oscars on the night of March 2nd eastern time. One interesting wrinkle in this year's Oscars that the academy has never truly had to deal with before is the use of Artificial Intelligence in film.

The film the Brutalist tells the story of a fictional Hungarian Architect, played by Adrien Brody, who travels to America for a better life after world war two. The film is nominated for ten oscars this year, Most Notably best actor, best director, and best picture.

The controversy surrounding the film is the fact that, according to multiple people who worked on the film including the editor of the film David Jansco and the film’s director Brady Corbet, is that Artificial intelligence was used to enhance the two key performances in the film. Adrien Brody as well as co-star Felicity Jones’s performances were altered in order to improve their character’s Hungarian dialogue.

According to the director, Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones both practiced with a dialect coach in order to speak Hungarian properly in the film, and that artificial intelligence was used to refine certain vowels in order to make them sound more accurate. The editor, David Jansco, said that during the editing process, they used artificial intelligence to add his own proper vowel pronunciation to Brody’s and Jones’s Hungarian language performances, saying that “Most of their Hungarian dialogue had a part of me in there.”

However The Brutalist was not the only movie that used AI last year, it's not even the only film that used AI to be nominated for Best Picture. The film Emilia Perez also used Artificial Intelligence, and is the film nominated for the most oscars this year with thirteen nominations, including nominations for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Actress. The film, which is a musical, used Artificial Intelligence to improve the singing voice of actress karla sofia gascon, who is nominated for best actress.

The debate here is whether or not it is fair for a film that was edited and enhanced using artificial intelligence to compete against ones that were not. Many argue that AI changed a major part of their performances and that changing said aspects of their performance should hurt their ability to win an oscar for said enhanced performance.

This objection has seemingly not however affected Brody’s ability to win awards, who has won several high profile awards, including a Bafta, critics choice award, and a golden globe for his performance in the brutalist, and is currently nominated for Best Actor.

Another fear here is that opportunities for more unknown actors to land parts over more well established ones are at risk of disappearing due to AI. In the cases of Emilia Perez and The Brutalist, in the past the parts played by Karla Sofia Gascon and Adrien Brody may have been casted differently so that the leading role was played by someone who could sing in the way the part called for or who could speak hungarian, respectively, instead these parts were given to more well known actors and patched up using AI.

While this is not the first instance of AI in high profile films, such as the use of AI to preserve the voice of James Earl Jones so that he may play the voice of Darth Vader even after his death, this is the first time films with genuine oscar aspirations have done so. The argument for this is that the AI does not detract from the performances, that use of AI is akin to the use of computer generated special effects, simply using modern technology in order to improve the quality of movies in the future.

Those working in the movie industry are obviously quite passionate about the AI issue, for instance after the film Heretic, which released last year, stated explicitly in the credits that the film was not made with AI One of the directors of the film, Bryan Woods, stated in an interview with Variety “I think this idea that an algorithm can just scrape all of human history and art off the internet, repackage it, regurgitate it, spit it out and somebody else can use that to create profit … I don’t know why that’s legal,” and went on to compare the use of generative AI to nuclear warheads, as impressive technology that quote “Might kill us all.” This bleak view of AI is certainly not universal, as more and more studios test the use of artificial intelligence for future projects however, such as Blumhouse which last year announced that they would be partnering with meta to use AI as part of some of their short films.

Looking back to the oscars, It is important to note that voting for the Oscars ended just recently, and that the fact that the Brutalist and Emilia Perez used Artificial intelligence was known when members of the academy casted their official ballots. This raises the question, if either film wins an oscar, what will this mean for the future of film? It seems likely that other award hopeful films will not shy away from using Artificial Intelligence in post production, particularly if they believe it may improve the film’s chances to win high profile awards.

In my view, AI is not simply the latest technology for film production, in the same way that technical advances in visual effects or sound design simply updated and modernized the industry. In the earliest days of film production, the purpose of visual effects was to present something to the audience in a new and interesting way, this has not fundamentally changed to this day, the method is different but whether one solely relies on practical methods such as makeup or puppets, or on computer generated imagery, nothing has inherently changed.

The same can be said for sound design, all that has changed is an increase in quality, but the form and purpose of sound design has simply changed to be more realistic, and of higher quality. Where generative AI differs is that in changing the actual performance of the actor, the form of acting has fundamentally changed. Without using AI, an actor’s job is to embody a character, and to present that character to the audience in a way that suits the story. After AI, the job of an actor is simply to lend their image to a computer, and then said computer will handle the rest. Acting would simply become having an attractive face.

While one could argue that the use of AI in The Brutalist and Emilia Perez does not replace the performance of the actors, that simply adding a vowel here and there and making a singing voice sound better are ultimately harmless, In this case I disagree. If the Academy rewards the use of Artificial Intelligence, I believe that sets a terrible precedent for the future of movies.

In Sports, when a player is caught using performance enhancing drugs they are almost always suspended or punished in some way, however when an actor uses performance enhancing software they are nominated for the fields highest honor. While I am not actually arguing that these actors should be punished for their performances being enhanced by generative AI, because at the very least it is unclear if they even knew their performances were going to be changed, I find the idea that an enhanced performance could win an Oscar to be frightening.

Filmmaking is and should always be a fundamentally creative endeavor, the most celebrated films should be the ones that accomplish something novel, the ones that provide the audience with something impressive and never seen before. Artificial intelligence is not capable of providing anything new, as the process by which it generates content is simply to amalgamate content it has viewed previously. What creates the creative worth of a film is the intellectual work infused into it by the people that contribute to its creation, the product of genuinely new and interesting thought being put to screen, what AI does is streamline the process in a way where less creative energy is infused within a work.

Artificial Intelligence is not being pushed onto movies for the sake of artistic merit, this can be seen in what is used for. Actors have already proven that they can sing, or speak a foreign language for a film, AI has not done anything new here. What AI has done is reduce the job of the actor and reduce the job of the casting director, it is a time saving measure.

The work of casting and filming a movie has been hastened so that studios can make more movies in a quicker period of time. It is on some level understandable that studios would want to save money and time on a film, however it should be the job of the Academy to push back on this tendency, to make sure the movies they celebrate are the ones that were allowed to demonstrate creativity to their fullest potential.

The Oscars as an institution means something, they have the power to fundamentally change the landscape of film. When an actor wins an Oscar, they cease to become a normal person, from that point on they will be known as an Oscar winning Actor. If the Oscars reward the film industry for this blatant cost cutting, they will demonstrate to everyone watching that the most efficient way to gain the ultimate recognition from their peers, an award that many actors and directors have worked their entire lives for, is to forgo creative control of their projects to a machine that is incapable of creating the revolutionary films the Oscars are meant to celebrate, and that I believe is a fundamentally dangerous idea to the act of creative filmmaking.

Moreover, I do not believe that proponents of AI have the interests of the audience in mind. As mentioned earlier, the purpose of bringing AI into the film industry is to save money, and this is not an intrinsically bad goal. It is indeed true that making movies cheaper to produce makes it so that it is not only the big budget studios producing movies, it opens the door for creative low budget filmmakers to exist in the space, which is always a good thing.

The problem is that the truly creative directors would not be the ones utilizing Artificial Intelligence, as their goal is ultimately unachievable if one uses AI. What this means is that AI reduces the cost only of fundamentally uncreative movies, and that will obviously motivate studios to produce more and more uncreative movies, as those are the ones that are cheapest to produce.

When movies and other forms of entertainment are seen solely as a means to make a profit, we all suffer. Movies do not exist in a vacuum, they are the method by which many of us primarily digest art. Without real movies, one of the most accessible forms of artistic expression would vanish from the face of the Earth, in favor of generic and bland nothings that only serve as a distraction, something that is best enjoyed when one is mindlessly placed in front of a screen.

In past depictions of Artificial Intelligence in media, they were seen as mindless robots built to serve humanity, to perform the tasks humanity did not want to do themselves anymore. AI was depicted as doing mindless tedious work so that human characters could conceivably spend their days doing what they enjoyed and being creative. Now that Artificial Intelligence is here, many are quick to allow AI to perform tasks that we as people are supposed to enjoy, leaving people more time to perform mindless tasks.

Looking back to Emilia Perez and The Brutalist, the fact that these are the movies that received a staggering amount of nominations does not bode well for the future of filmmaking, however if the Oscar voters did choose not to award them, it would be a step in the right direction towards preventing the widespread use of AI in filmmaking. However, if either is awarded with the highly prestigious oscars they are nominated for, I think that without an active course correction by the academy next year, the near future of filmmaking would continue to look bleaker and bleaker.

Particularly in the case of the brutalist, Not truly knowing the extent to which AI changed the nature of Adrien Brody’s performance in the film also adds another layer to this. While the makers of the film have only ever claimed AI was used sparingly, only for minor improvements, we do know that a large amount of the film’s frequent Hungarian dialogue were changed, and if these AI enhancements were more in depth than they make it seem, it's hard to know how this could affect the future of film. Be sure to tune in to the oscars on the morning of march third for those of us in shanghai, and thank you for listening to this episode of magnolia on mic.