The director of "The Brutalist", Brady Corbet, has been defending utilising AI since receiving hefty backlash for admitting to using the contentious tech in his film. He used AI to adjust leading actors Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones' Hungarian dialect and generate specific images for the film's ending.

In his defense, Corbet said, "Adrien and Felicity's performances are completely their own. They worked for months with dialect coach Tanera Marshall to perfect their accents. Innovative Respeecher technology was used only in Hungarian language dialogue editing, specifically to refine certain vowels and letters for accuracy." 

"No English language was changed. This was a manual process, done by our sound team and Respeecher in post-production. The aim was to preserve the authenticity of Adrien and Felicity's performances in another language, not to replace or alter them, and done with the utmost respect for the craft," he added.

Regarding generating images he expressed, "Judy Becker and her team did not use AI to create or render any of the buildings. All images were hand-drawn by artists. To clarify, in the memorial video featured in the background of a shot, our editorial team created pictures intentionally designed to look like poor digital renderings circa 1980."

Corbet concluded his statement by admitting, "'The Brutalist' is a film about human complexity, and every aspect of its creation was driven by human effort, creativity, and collaboration. We are incredibly proud of our team and what they have accomplished here."

The controversy began when editor Dávid Jancsó disclosed that AI was employed to enhance the authenticity of Brody and Jones' Hungarian accents and to develop "a series of architectural drawings and finished buildings" featured in the film's closing scene.

"We should be having a very open discussion about what tools AI can provide us with," Jancsó said. "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."

This debate surrounding the use of AI in constructing a creative product that is likely to reach the nominations list for this year's Oscars fuels the ever-burning controversies around AI — underscoring the increasing blend of AI and the arts, and igniting discussions about where technology enhances creativity and where it risks diminishing it.