Why the Awards Race Is the Next Great Front in

At the start of this year, the awards campaign for Brady Corbet’s immigrant epic The Brutalist was briefly derailed by a scandal befitting our era—a controversy surrounding its use of generative artificial intelligence. The film’s editor, Dávid Jancsó, revealed that the Hungarian dialogue spoken by stars Felicity Jones and Adrien Brody, who went on to win the Oscar for best actor, was refined via Respeecher, a software company with expertise in AI voice generation. These modifications were seemingly minor, but the notion that AI was being used to enhance performances proved, to many, surprising—and unsettling. Where else was AI being used that we didn’t know about? How could an average viewer—or, for that matter, an awards voter—track where the human craft ended and the wonders of modern technology began?

These questions get at ongoing, intensifying debates surrounding the future use of AI in film, which feels both inevitable and potentially devastating to those who work in the industry, many of whom have already been fighting to hold on to their jobs. You’ve got areas of significant pushback: Major Hollywood studios Disney and Universal are now suing the AI image generation company Midjourney over alleged copyright infringement. But other big names are boldly forging ahead: “It feels here what the beginning of Pixar must have felt like,” Natasha Lyonne recently told The Hollywood Reporter, about her new AI entertainment start-up, Asteria. “Everyone is in the Imagineering phase—very blue-sky, very inspiring, all trying to crack the code.”

Amid these rapid developments, artisans on the ground in Hollywood are wondering what’s next. AI is top of mind for the guilds and societies that represent specific areas of filmmaking—from SAG-AFTRA, which consists of 160,000 actors and media personalities, to the Visual Effects Society, which has more than 5,000 members operating in 50-plus countries. Each has a different boundary to draw, and in most cases, hasn’t yet fully determined where that line falls. These groups also give out their own accolades, often serving as precursors to the Oscars. Increasingly, these awards are becoming important markers in the AI debate.

Take The Brutalist’s example. Months after that scandal blew up, the Motion Picture Sound Editors announced a stark change in eligibility for their own awards next year: Absolutely no project that uses generative AI to create sound can even be considered. The Brutalist wasn’t nominated by the MPSE anyway, but another 2024 contender that used Respeecher, the musical Emilia Pérez, won an award from the group. It was also nominated for the best-sound Oscar.

The MPSE’s president, David Barber, described the rule change as a mere “pause” amid so much tumult. “We’re not saying progress needs to stop now and forever in 2025,” he says. “We are here to champion the tools that make people better artists—and not to champion the tools that facilitate the imitation of artistic creation.”

The various guild leaders and members I’ve spoken with over the last few months want to differentiate ethical and legal use of AI from, as Barber puts it, “AI that is created and/or used with the intention to replace human artists. It’s a simple distinction.” The Brutalist actually would likely be eligible under future, finalized MPSE guardrails because Respeecher is compliant with ethics initiatives and requires permission from the actor. But even then: “It is hard to know the degree to which it was used,” Barber says.

Broadly, the technology is evolving so aggressively that specific cases can’t be properly evaluated. “[I] can’t go by a week without something popping into [my] inbox about a new generative-AI breakthrough,” Barber says. “They’re coming fast and furious—and pretty much without regard to industry professionals or even societal implications. We had to put a stop to the wave.”

When I profiled Scarlett Johansson earlier this year, she told me that the end of the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike came down to, in part, the inability to properly address AI with the big studios—a partial driver of the work stoppage that proved ultimately too unwieldy to negotiate in a timely manner. “[We were] repeatedly reminding the union, ‘This is not an issue we can solve. People need to go back to work,’” she said.

This is what organizations like SAG are dealing with—they’re at the whim of legislation that would protect actors and others in the industry that simply doesn’t exist, at least not yet. It’s why the MPSE is shutting down the potential for AI in its awards until the industry has more clarity on how it can and should be used. It’s why several other guilds declined to speak for this story—they’re in wait-and-see mode. And it’s why others are choosing not to address AI, for now, in how they determine the value of their craft. “It’d be a Herculean task to decide what constitutes fair use of AI and not fair use, and try to separate out those and have people report on each and every use,” says Kim Davidson, the board chair of the Visual Effects Society. “Sometimes they’re using tools they don’t even know are powered by AI, per se.”

The VES Awards have no mandatory disclosure of the use of AI tools for submissions, only an attestation of no copyright violations. But as Davidson, the president and CEO of the company SideFX, acknowledges, “It’s hard to go through them with a fine-tooth comb.” The visual effects field has long been at the controversial forefront of Hollywood awards. According to The Guardian, at the 1983 Oscars, Tron was disqualified from the visual effects category for allegedly cheating by using computers.

“There’s been machine learning—now popularly called AI—in computer graphics for years before it became popular in the broad, mainstream press. De-noising, rotoscoping, de-aging—those kinds of things preceded the popularity of AI,” Davidson says. “But the last thing we would want to do is cheat anyone out of fair attribution. We’re not going to get any benefit out of doing that. Studios are not going to get any benefit out of cheating out actors and writers—in fact, you need them.”