The Brutalist, a three-and-a-half-hour awards favorite, is a film about human creativity. Ironically, its biggest scandal surrounds artificial intelligence.Brady Corbets epic follows Hungarian Jew Lszl Tth, played by Adrien Brody, as he flees the Nazis and picks up his architecture practice in the United States. Eventually he manages to bring his wife, Erzsbet, played by Felicity Jones, to join him. Both characters frequently speak in Hungarian throughout the film. That dialogue, it turns out, may have been supplemented by an AI speech tool.In an interview with RedShark News, The Brutalists editor, Dvid Jancs, revealed that the film had employed Respeecher, an AI voice editing tool. Cinephiles online blew up, with some even planning to boycott the film. Corbet is now on an oddball apology tour, clarifying just how AI was used by the production. But he shouldnt have to be. The mass freakout fundamentally misunderstands what film editing actually looks like, and how films stay on budget.What is artificial film editing?Jancs is a native Hungarian speaker; he knows how difficult the language is to replicate. Thats true even for Brody, whose mother is in fact a Hungarian refugee. While producers coached Brody and Jones intensively, they used the AI tool Respeecher to insert some of Jancss own pronunciations into the dialogue.In the RedShark interview, Jancs acknowledges how commonplace these types of audio edits are. You can do this in [Avid] Pro Tools yourself, but we had so much dialogue in Hungarian that we really needed to speed up the process otherwise wed still be in post, he said. Thats what the naysayers misunderstand: Film editing is fundamentally artificial. For years, filmmakers have been manipulating dialogue through creative splicing and re-creation. Editing tools have gotten increasingly more sophisticated. Now theyre just labeled with AI.Jancs also said in the interview that generative AI helped create the architectural images featured in the final sequence of the film. Corbet later clarified: Judy Becker and her team did not use AI to create or render any of the buildings. All images were hand-drawn by artists. Remember that The Brutalist, a sprawling cinematic epic of proportions rarely produced in the current film market, was made for a mere $10 million. For reference, the film in which Brody had his breakout, Academy Award-winning role, The Pianist, cost $25 million moreand that was 22 years ago. Hand-drawing all images on The Brutalists budget, even if modulated or inspired by AI, is impressive.But cinephiles online couldnt take it. One viral X post says Jancs is just looking for an excuse to avoid paying visual artists and suggests it amounts to the erasure of a fundamental aspect of . . . acting. Many have said its hypocritical to use AI in a film about the humanity of art; others say Brody should be disqualified from Oscar contention.Whos afraid of the big bad AI?The film industry has a good reason to be fearful of AI. Feature films are being created out of thin air, with no craft behind them. Their quality is still low, but its a daunting sign of whats to come. Some Hollywood studios began collecting body scans of actors, worrying many that extra work would evaporate. Contracts reached in the 2023 Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists and Writers Guild of America strikes both included AI clauses.But this fear of human replacement has turned AI into a technological boogeyman. The words artificial intelligence are enough of a dog whistle to stir outrage. But lets face it: Hollywood can and will adapt to AI, and there may even be some benefits. These critics are merely burying their heads in the sand instead of properly appraising which applications are helpful and which arent.The Brutalist controversy will eventually pass, though the commotion could be a blow to the films Oscar chances. What will linger is this culture of AI hysteria.