TThe use of artificial intelligence could become a fierce battleground during movie awards season, as at least two major contenders have been found to have used voice cloning to enhance actors’ performances.
In an interview with moving-picture publication Red Shark News, Brutalist editor-in-chief Dávid Jancsó said that, in an effort to create Hungarian dialogue so perfect “that even locals won’t notice any difference,” Jancsó nurtured lead actors Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones. voice in the AI software, as well as his own.
In the film, Brody plays Jewish-Hungarian architect László Tóth, who emigrates to the United States after World War II, and Jones plays his wife Erzsébet. Jancsó, a Hungarian speaker, said that even though Brody’s mother was an emigrant from Hungary in real life, “coaching” and re-recording via ADR (automated dialogue replacement) with the original actors and replacements “didn’t work.” just didn’t work.” .
Jancsó said he then used an AI tool developed by Respeecher, a Ukraine-based company that was previously involved in “cloning” the voice of James Earl Jones for the Obi-Wan Kenobi television series, to add individual sounds and letters to both. Hungarian dialogue between Brody and Jones. “Most of their Hungarian dialogues feature a part of me speaking. We were very careful to maintain their performance. It’s mostly just replacing letters here and there… We had so much dialogue in Hungarian that we really had to speed up the process, otherwise we’d still be in office.
It also emerged that AI cloning was used to improve the singing voice of Emilia Pérez’s Karla Sofía Gascón, in the trans gangster musical directed by Jacques Audiard. In an interview recorded in May at the Cannes Film Festival, the film’s re-recording mixer, Cyril Holtz, said that it was necessary to increase the range of Gascón’s vocal register and that the production used Repeecher to mix their singing with that of Camille, the French singer. pop star who co-wrote the film’s music.
Conversely, Heretic, the horror film starring Hugh Grant, took a radically anti-AI stance, with its end credits including the message: “No generative AI was used in the making of this film. »
The recent actors’ and writers’ strike was triggered, at least in part, by the threat that AI poses to much of the film, television and video game industry, with agreements including “safeguards” against the use of AI to generate scripts. A strike by video game actors for the reproduction of their voices is still underway.
Filmmaker Paul Schrader revealed in a Facebook post that he had also experimented with AI, using ChatGPT to generate film ideas from major arthouses including Paul Thomas Anderson, Quentin Tarantino, Ingmar Bergman and himself. Writing, “I’M STUNNED,” he added, “Every idea ChatGPT came up with (in seconds) was good. And original. And fleshed out. Why should writers spend months looking for a good idea when AI can deliver one in seconds? Rather than being an endorsement of AI, Schrader told the Guardian: “People wrongly think that AI is a technological advancement like (the) automobile when in fact it is a virus driven by a hyperbolic curve. »
In the current feverish atmosphere in Hollywood regarding AI, it is difficult to assess the impact that these revelations on the use of this technology could have on the current Oscar race, including the nominations Final decisions must be announced on January 23. Brody is now a strong contender for Best Actor, having won the Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Drama, while Gascón appears likely to be the first trans actor to be nominated for the Best Actress Oscar.
