2/05/2025

Headline, February 06 2025/ ''' HOLLYWOOD A.I. HOLOCAUST* '''


''' HOLLYWOOD A.I.

 HOLOCAUST* '''



A BRUTAL BACKLASH : AI VOICE TECHNOLOGY used in The Brutalist is nothing new - the backlash over its use in the lead-up is about nothing more than transparency.

Director Brady Corbet's stunning new film, The Brutalist, has won the three Golden Globes and remains a frontrunner for this year's Oscars despite a controversy over the use of A.I., which erupted this week.

[ The film has received 10 Oscar nominations, including best film, best director and best actor.]

The growing backlash centres on whether the film should have used AI to improve the Hungarian accents of its stars, Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones.

Many of today's actors are superb at delivering accents - like American Renee Zellweger's perfect English in Bridget Jones, a British actor Idris Elba's Baltimore accent in The Wire or Australian Margot Robbie's utterly convincing American accent in Barbie.

For The Brutalist, the accent challenges faced by Brody and Jones was truly brutal : the tricky vowel sounds of the Hungarian language. It was even difficult for Brody, whose mother was the Hungarian refugee who arrived in the US in 1956.

Brody's character is Laszlo Toth [ roughly pronounced Laslo Tort ] a Hungarian - Jewish architect who emigrated to the US after the Holocaust. Jones plays his wife, Erzsebet [ roughly Air-zhay-bet ], trapped back in Europe.

During the Film's post-production, the Budapest born editor, David Jancso [ pronounced Daavid Yancho ] was looking for accent perfection.

So he reached for an AI tool that could make Broody's and Jones accents sound convincingly Hungarian.

The controversy over this decision is surprising because it is nothing new. I have been researching the creative use of AI in filmmaking for the past six years. Recently, the biggest progress has been in voice AI.

Voice cloning technology has been misused, causing outrage over unlicensed vocal replicas of Jennifer Aniston, Scarlett Johansson and David Attenborough. But, The Brutalist made just tiny alterations to two actors' voices - and with consent - which, in comparison, is hardly shocking.

My research has involved interviews with Alex Serdiuk, CEO of the voice cloning company Respeecher, which worked on The Brutalist. Two years ago, Serdiuk told me about the accent tools that they were developing. He is Ukrainian but speaks superb English in his native accent.

Listening to my voice, he said that, with Respeecher's new AI tool, '' we basically can make you speak with my accent. I would be your accent donor.''

This technology could even help out US actors working on a British production who lack Renee Zellweger's accent skills: “We can just take their performance speaking American English and apply a Royal British accent on top of it,” says Serdiuk.

This was the AI tool that David Jancso used in The Brutalist, taking his own Hungarian vowels and consonants and developing them to Brody and Jones.

Respeecher has been working with Hollywood for years. For The Mandalorian in 2020, the company used AI to create the more youthful voice of Luke Sky Walker [ Mark Hamill was 68 at the time of shooting].

In last year's Robbie Williams biopic Better Man [ directed by Michael Gracey], helped create  Williams' voice for his CGI chimp avatar.

So what is the problem with The Brutalist? The big issue here is transparency. No one likes to feel deceived and this backlash is emerging after American viewers saw the film without knowing.

We learned the lessons of transparency back in 2021, with the documentary Roadrunner, a film about the celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain.

Oscar-winning director Morgan Neville used voice cloning and did not tell anyone about it - until his audience worked out that a sequence where Bourdain reads his own email couldn't have happened.

Viewers felt deceived [ Neville told critics that there were other moments in the film where he also did it, but wouldn't say where ]. David Jancso's use of AI in The Brutalist is tiny in comparison, but the reaction it has provoked is once again down to the audience being kept in the dark.

The Honour and Serving of the Latest Global Operational Research on AI, Respeechers, and the Future, continues. The World Students Society thanks Dominic Lees, an Associate Professor in Filmmaking at the University of Reading in the UK.

With respectful dedication to Hollywood, the Global Founder Framers of !WOW! and then Students, Professors and Teachers.

See You all prepare for Great Global Elections on The World Students Society : wssciw.blogspot.com and Twitter X !E-WOW!  - The Ecosystem 2011 :

Good Night and God Bless

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless

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