The 97th Academy Awards will be presented on Sunday, March 2. It wouldn’t be an Academy Awards show without some type of controversary, and this year, among other issues, the use of artificial intelligence (AI) is creating a bit of a hubbub.
While films in general using some sort of AI is not a new thing, two of the frontrunners for Best Picture this year, “The Brutalist and “Emilia Perez,” use it significantly in altering voices of main characters who were nominated for acting awards.
Both films utilized the software Respeecher, which clones and enhances speech patterns of various languages.
In the case of “The Brutalist,” the software was used to give Adrian Brody a more authentic Hungarian accent. In “Emilia Perez,” the software gave Karla Sofia Gascon a more refined singing voice.
It’s not to say that the acting performances of Brody and Gascon weren’t great, but it becomes a slippery slope issue in presenting an award for a human performance when that performance has been aided in artificial means in some way. It also is currently a sensitive issue for members of the voting academy, who are coming off recent strikes with the issue of the use of AI in content creation a major factor.
Whether it’s the movie industry or any other aspect of our lives, AI is going to impact it in exponentially growing ways, and we all will need to live with and use it well.
How we live with and use it is probably worth some time of our consideration moving forward.
Three recent books in our library collection explore the balance between the growth of AI and our humanity.
Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic’s. “I, Human: AI, Automation, and the Quest to Reclaim What Makes Us Unique” offers thoughts on reclaiming ourselves in a world in which most of our decisions will be made for us.
Brian Christian’s “The Alignment Problem: Machine Learning and Human Values” looks at ethical issues when AI does more than we want or something completely different. Joy Buolamwini’s “Unmasking AI: My Mission to Protect What Is Human in a World of Machines”considers primarily racist, sexist and ableist concerns with current AI tools.
All three books are written in a readable, thought-provoking way. In addition to those books, also check out articles and viewpoint essays on the topic in the library’s “Opposing Viewpoints” database.
Speaking of the Academy Awards, and if you’ve read this far, send your picks of in all twenty-three categories presented the night of the ceremony by Feb. 28 in an email to [email protected] for a chance to win a Marcus gift card.
In case of a tie, the winner will be selected from a random hat drawing. Oh, and if possible, resist the impulse to have AI make all the picks for you.