Why People Are Freaked Out That "The Brutalist" Used AI For Architecture

Generative AI—tools that are trained by existing content to create images, videos, and text—have incited much ire. Using them is energy-intensive (researchers estimate that one ChatGPT prompt utilizes around 16 ounces of water), they could be violating copyright, and they take away jobs, especially in precarious creative industries. But some creative professionals are finding AI tools useful in their practice, not just indulgent and unethical. 

So is the case with director Brady Corbet’s film, The Brutalist. In January, after it was announced that the film was nominated for ten Academy Awards, including Best Picture, editor Dávid Jancsó revealed in an interview with Red Shark News that the filmmakers had used AI tools in post-production: first, to correct Hungarian accents, and second, reads the Red Shark story, to "conjure a series of architectural drawings and finished buildings in the style of the fictional architect."

For some, it was a shocking revelation: A film praised for its rigor and authenticity had relied on a generative tool to enhance realistic detailing. Just after Jancsó’s interview riled critics, Corbet attempted to provide some reassurance to The Hollywood Reporter. Ironically, the concern over intellectual ownership echoes the plot of the film itself.

A quick recap: The Brutalist is a fictional film about László Tóth (Adrian Brody), a Hungarian Jewish refugee, who has escaped Nazi death camps and restarted his career in America. Much of the three and a half hour movie centers on his fraught relationships: with his patron, a wealthy tycoon (played by Guy Pearce) who commissions Toth to build a community and religious center; and, with his wife and niece, who arrive in America traumatized and scarred by the war. Throughout the film, Brody’s character battles his own trauma and need for control. At one point during the community center’s construction, clashes with contractors and another architect (brought on for a second opinion) reveals Toth’s virulent temper and desire for absolute creative control over his artistic vision.

 The character is a bit of a cliche, to the point where much of the film’s criticism has centered around just how tired the "lone genius" trope is. The mythology of this tortured starchitect who must control every aspect of a project’s design and construction has been blamed for fueling the industry’s penchant for abuse; it also produces a dull, one-dimensional story of design. So when these AI-generated images appear—at the film’s epilogue, a "retrospective" of Tóth’s work at the end of his life that includes a slideshow of the AI-generated images—there's a deep irony. That a film about a controlling genius would include images created by AI seems counterintuitive at best, and at worst, careless. 

Garrett Laroy Johnson, an artist (whose work uses generative AI) and programmer who co-founded the Center for Concrete and Abstract Machines, says that as AI starts to seep into our cultural consumption we should be having difficult conversations about "a new workflow" in creative practices. "I think that we will probably need to get to a place where we are not just rubber stamping things that have AI on them as ‘lazy.’ The proof is in the pudding: were these images interesting? Was it convincing?" he asks. Rather than being solely critical of the tool itself, which might bleed skepticism onto the user, the question is whether or not the artist is using their expertise to make this call. 

"Understanding fundamentals and having an appreciation for artfulness—these are things that are super necessary. The computer is not doing the creative work for me; it can be conversational in some ways, but I'm able to use this in a way that I and others find gratifying," he says. "This production designer is probably extremely experienced and worked on films for a long time—where's the appreciation of that?"

Like the lone genius hell bent on one vision, perhaps immediately writing off AI tools is a mistake. But when it comes to issues of lost or usurped labor, we hope strong unions with iron-clad workplace protections will ensure that human talent is utilized and compensated. The key here, Johnson emphasizes, is transparency in when and how these tools are used, and what effect they have on an artwork, architectural drawing, or film. Perhaps this was The Brutalist’s biggest blunder: to make a film that is inherently about craft while omitting details of its own making. 

Top photo courtesy of A24.

Related reading:

How the "The Brutalist" Production Designer Went "Method" to Embody a Fictional Architect

I Used AI Interior Designers to Reimagine My Boring Basement

Will Algorithms Be the New Architects?