Credit: Sandra Fu | Photo Editor
When nominations for the 2025 Academy Awards were released, “The Brutalist” was honored in a whopping 10 categories, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actor in a Leading Role.
Considering this impressive list of nominations, one might think the period drama is an unequivocal success. In the wider film landscape, however, “The Brutalist” proved to be divisive on one major front: its use of artificial intelligence.
The movie has come under fire for using AI to authenticate the Hungarian accents of lead actors and help generate architectural blueprints created by protagonist László Tóth, played by Adrien Brody.
In recent years, the use of AI in film has become a highly controversial topic, with many citing concerns like a loss of creativity, the replacement of human roles with technology and the theft of artists’ pre-existing work. But “The Brutalist” has been thrown into even hotter water due to the movie’s status as a “Best Picture” nominee.
Throughout the history of film, practices such as using computer-generated imaging and motion capture have enhanced storytelling within franchises like “Jurassic Park” and “Lord of the Rings,” featuring technology that, at the time, was considered revolutionary.
Simply put, the use of AI in film is not a new concept.
Chris Stults, curator of Film/Video at the Wexner Center for the Arts, said the first major instance of AI being employed in film was in the 2021 documentary “Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain,” for which the technology was used to replicate Bourdain’s voice after his death in 2018.
“They had a lot of voiceover directly from him because he read his own audio books, so they could use his voice,” Stults said. “But then, there was one book that they had that he’d written, but he didn’t do an audiobook for it, so they used AI to create his voice reading that, and the documentary community was really up in arms about it.”
Stults said in his opinion, the case of “The Brutalist” is not as big of a deal as some individuals in the film community are making it out to be.
“It’s not creating new imagery or artificial things, necessarily,” Stults said. “It’s, like, tweaking pronunciation and then creating a base image for the drafts of the buildings. Another person actually made the things you saw in the film based off of those.”
Scott Spears — a lecturer in Ohio State’s Department of Theatre, Film, and Media Arts — said he’s seen AI used first-hand for positive and creative purposes. In particular, he mentioned how AI can help inspire the aesthetics of student films in sets of images known as “lookbooks.”
“Several students over in the film program have used it to create lookbooks or a lookbook for their film, saying, ‘Hey, create a 1940s detective, but he’s in a spaceship,’” Spears said.
Dash Nelli, a first-year in mechanical engineering and member of the university’s Film/Video Club, said he has experimented with AI for his own creative endeavors but has found it can only help so much.
“Occasionally, it has been helpful, but it kind of feels like an over-eager assistant who’s really good at only the first step of anything, and it always needs a human there to help with that,” Nelli said.
Spears agreed, adding that while he thinks AI can be helpful for giving advice and brainstorming, he completes the majority of any screenwriting work himself.
“It would create an outline,” Spears said. “Maybe I could take that outline and go, ‘Alright, there’s four points in there that are really good. That’s something I’ve not considered.’ I’ll build off that, but probably 90% of whatever [is] generated won’t be there anymore.”
For every argument in favor of AI use in moderation, an argument can be made against it. Even so, setting a standard for what makes AI use ethical is extremely difficult, Stults said. He also said AI simply cannot do the work humans can.
“It’s still based on theft of previously existing work, total copyright infringement,” Stults said. “Art is kind of about advancing the possibilities of imagination, and AI can only put out what’s been fed into it, so it’s just going to regurgitate cliches, and stereotypes and already existing things.”
Spears said even with AI becoming more advanced, it is still not always accurate.
“It hallucinates things,” Spears said. “I totally have six fingers, or one eye on my forehead, etc., I have a half of a beard. That’s the problem.”
Perhaps the most major argument against AI is that it will cause a profound loss of jobs in the film industry. Nelli said this fear comes down to the entire purpose of AI, which is to replace human work.
“The entire point of an AI is to emulate what humans are able to do,” Nelli said. “And so, the idea of taking an industry that’s built around art and trying to replace the humans in it feels like something that runs me the wrong way.”
Though it’s hard to tell where the future of AI will take the film industry, Spears said one fact remains certain: The technology will continue being widely discussed and used. Therefore, he said he hopes creatives will do their best to implement these industry-altering tools with caution.
“It’s just going to keep coming,” Spears said. “But I think smart people need to step up and put some kind of guardrails — I’m not going to say limitations, but guardrails and ways to glide us in so we have AI to aid us, but not to 100%, you know, destroy parts of the industry.”
