Everything you need to know about the Oscars’ AI controversy

Sometimes, authenticity can be a film’s most special effect.

It took months for Best Actress front-runner Mikey Madison to learn how to pole dance like the titular exotic dancer in Anora and for her fellow nominee Timothée Chalamet to passably play guitar as Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown. The naturalism of both performances helped keep audiences under the spell cast by their surrounding films. So, it should probably come as no surprise that a backlash has emerged in response to several of this year’s Oscar-nominated films using AI, paradoxically, to achieve “authenticity.”

The reaction began on January 11, when editor Dávid Jancsó revealed in an interview that he and director Brady Corbet had used AI voice technology to make Oscar favorite The Brutalist. The film stars Adrien Brody as Hungarian-Jewish architect László Tóth, who, after surviving the Holocaust, emigrated to the U.S. where he is joined years later by his wife, Erzsébet, played by Felicity Jones. Although both actors, each of whom are nominated for Oscars, underwent vocal coaching to make the Hungarian dialogue roll off their tongues, according to Jancsó it “just didn’t work.” The creators ended up using Respeecher, a Ukraine-based AI voice-cloning tool, to enhance Brody and Jones’s accents.

This revelation provoked an online uproar so intense that Corbet issued a statement to The Hollywood Reporter days later, downplaying AI’s significance in the making of the film.

“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,” the director said in his statement.

In the weeks since The Brutalist came under the microscope, similar revelations have tumbled out regarding other Oscar-nominated films. In a recently surfaced French-language interview from last year’s Cannes festival, for instance, rerecording mixer Cyril Holtz disclosed that trans musical Emilia Pérez, the most-nominated film in this year’s Oscar crop, also used Respeecher to enhance star Karla Sofía Gascón’s singing voice. (Emilia Pérez has far bigger fish to fry in terms of backlash, however, given Gascón’s shocking history of inflammatory tweets.)

Leaning on AI to zhuzh up an actor’s performance has proven controversial this year, due to the technology’s rapid encroachment into traditionally human-created art. Some worry that AI will deprive film workers at various levels of jobs in the name of cost-cutting, while others fear it will usher in an era of cinematic soullessness. (Those folks have apparently never seen any of the ostensibly AI-free blockbusters shot entirely on green screen.) Indeed, part of the reason the writers’ and actors’ strikes of 2023 went on for so long was because of the difficulty in securing protections against AI. Ultimately, the strikes succeeded in placing guardrails around the tech’s use in generating scripts and requiring consent and compensation for using an actor’s likeness.

Visual artists and animators have won no such protections yet, though. Considering all the looming fears about an unemployment crisis in film and TV art departments, it’s no wonder the use of AI in visual effects has proven especially unpopular recently. The acclaimed 2024 horror film Late Night with the Devil came under fire last spring for using AI to quickly create three briefly shown images; around the same time, the A24 thriller Civil War generated controversy for using AI just in its poster art. 

Now, the debate about the ethics of movie imagery that uses AI has reached the Oscars too.

Since the brouhaha began over The Brutalist’s AI vocal enhancement, revelations have spilled out about other films using AI for visual effects. (Brutalist editor Jancsó also claimed in his infamous interview that some blueprints and finished buildings depicted in the film were partially AI-generated, though director Corbet disputes this.) When Australia-based Rising Sun Pictures submitted its work on Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga for an award at the 2025 Visual Effects Society Awards, the company boasted about using its Revize machine learning toolset to create effects for A Complete Unknown, adding a new dimension to the Oscars’ AI conversation. (As an individual familiar with the film told Indiewire, “The technology was used to assist in three brief wide shots on a motorcycle, not involving performance or creative enhancements. This technology is commonplace for making stunt people resemble their actor in films.”) On a similar note, another film nominated for multiple Oscars and starring Chalamet, Dune: Part Two, also used machine learning to create the striking ice-blue eye color of its Fremen characters.

How much should any of this matter? Perhaps not that much.

It’s not as if whole chunks of any of these films were created using OpenAI’s text-to-video tool Sora or Google’s Veo 2. Instead, the AI-infused visual effects are minimal and seem in line with the kind of VFX work that’s been rocking multiplexes for decades. Furthermore, the vocal tune-up in The Brutalist is limited to the few scenes where Brody and Jones actually speak in Hungarian. (For the bulk of the film, they talk in heavily accented English.) And as for Gascón’s juiced singing in Emilia Pérez, Rami Malek won an Oscar in 2019 for playing Freddie Mercury in Bohemian Rhapsody, and only a stunt vocalist contributed any real singing to that film.

But at least the stunt vocalist was human.

As the use of AI seems increasingly inevitable in film and TV’s future, despite the pronounced ongoing backlash, purists might decide to draw a line in the sand—boycotting any and all projects that utilize it. As if to accommodate them, the Motion Picture Academy is reportedly weighing a rule that would require filmmakers to disclose when their films use AI.

In the meantime, some aren’t waiting around for such rules to be implemented and are instead taking the opposite tact. When the A24 horror movie Heretic came out last fall, it bore the following caption in its end credits: “No generative AI was used in the making of this film.”

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