'The Brutalist' Highlights AI's Impact on the Design World

Brady Corbet’s film The Brutalist, nominated for some 10 Academy Awards including Best Picture and Best Directing, is in many ways a traditional Hollywood epic. It tells the fictional story of Lázló Tóth (played by Adrian Brody with his characteristic maximalism), a Bauhaus-trained architect who survives the Buchenwald concentration camp and escapes to America, where he eventually reunites with his family and resumes his career of willing bold, high Modernist buildings into existence. Recognition of Tóth’s genius comes only at the end of his life, where his career retrospective is the toast of the inaugural Venice Architectural Biennale in 1980.

The film is old-school in much of its technique: It’s the first movie to be shot using the mid-century, widescreen film technique Vista Vision since Marlon Brando’s Western One-Eyed Jacks in 1961. But it’s also utterly of its moment, for better or worse, thanks to Corbet’s controversial embrace of AI to create some of its sound and vision.

Brody and Felicity Jones, who plays his wife, speak in Hungarian through much of the movie. To augment the authenticity of their performances, Corbet and his editor Dávid Jancsó employed the AI startup Respeecher, whose technology, Corbet told The Hollywood Reporter, “was used in Hungarian language dialogue editing only, specifically to refine certain vowels and letters for accuracy.” Oscar season blowback came quickly, with critics wondering if an AI-assisted performance, even if the tweaks may not substantially be greater than, say, laborious edits made by human hand in ProTools, should disqualify Brody from acting awards. So far, it hasn’t: Brody won a Golden Globe for the performance and may well will an Oscar.

A second, more subtle use of AI in the film is, perhaps, more troubling. The Brutalist ends with the Venice Biennale retrospective’s look back at Tóth’s buildings, a stately march of sober concrete volumes represented in drawings, blueprints, and early digital-rendering programs. Meanwhile, Tóth’s niece Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy) tells the opening night audience that Tóth’s inspiration for his first Brutalist masterpiece in America was, in fact, the architecture of the Buchenwald concentration camp.

Tóth is a composite figure, whose work finds historical reference in the material innovation of Marcel Breuer, the monumental elegance of Louis Kahn, and the world-building ambition of Le Corbusier. While anti-Semitism undeniably had (and continues to have) pernicious effects on Modernist architecture, Corbet’s notion that Brutalism, a style anchored in audacious balances of heft and balance, the solid and the ephemeral, and which is often dismissed as foreboding and grim, could have its roots in Nazi trauma, requires fictionalization. The body of work he and production designer Judy Becker created for him is undeniably accomplished, and arguably period appropriate.

But controversy arrived when it became known that, along with the hand-drawn documentation of his buildings that appear in the montage, the team also used AI to make some of the pictures. While they have not specified which were used, likely technologies include generative AI like Stability AI, Midjourney, and DeviantArt. Critics have argued that using AI to imagine new buildings is a kind of artistic cheating, while others push back that this, admittedly minor, use of the technology is not much different than using Photoshop to create a mood board.

What can’t be denied, however, is generative AI’s roots in the kind of capitalist exploitation The Brutalist argues against. In 2023, a group of artists launched a class action lawsuit against that trio of tech companies, arguing among other things that the vast data scrape used to train the programs used labor by artists without their consent or compensation. Interior designers allege theft, as well: Heidi Caillier, for example, posted on Instagram an image in which, she says, World Market used AI to imitate her effort. “They stole our work and the work of our photographer [Haris Kenjar],” she wrote in the post. “As creatives, we have become desperate to feed this monster. A monster that is likely giving out our work for free, for AI to learn and eventually steal to sell someone’s cheap products.” The post got more than 20,000 likes and a thousand-plus comments, mostly commiserations, from fellow designers.

Unlike Tóth, the data scrape is real. It’s an extraction of artistic effort on a global scale, to my mind, that fuels an industry whose environmental impact is equally grave. AI’s appearance in The Brutalist, then, is jarring, like a blood red spot on raw concrete. It’s a film whose climax depends on artistic recognition, and one made in part by a program designed to replace (or, if you’re more sympathetic, augment) human inspiration. The irony is, well, brutal.

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