Emily Blunt doing her own performance in Disclosure Day is the bare minimum for actors

Ahead of the release of one of the year’s most anticipated summer blockbusters, its star has revealed she refused to use AI to enhance her performance.

Oppenheimer Oscar nominee Emily Blunt leads the cast of Steven Spielberg’s new movie Disclosure Day playing a weather presenter who starts speaking in an alien language during a live TV broadcast.

Previously an outspoken critic of AI actress Tilly Norwood, Blunt shared that she was ‘terrified’ to rely on generative tech to enhance the sound of her headline-grabbing stuttering non-human language in the scene, which is showcased in the trailer.

So the 43-year-old Brit instead did it all herself, alongside the film’s (human) sound designer.

And I think that’s the bare minimum we should be expecting from Hollywood A-Listers and serious actors.

‘It’s a four-minute oner that we shot that leads up to that moment where she’s gradually sort of disintegrating. There’s various ways you could do it. You could go the AI route, which I’m a bit terrified of,’ Blunt explained on YouTube show Hot Ones.

Instead, she thought she could ‘make some really strange sounds’ herself.

‘So I said maybe I could come in and we’ll just do a range of weird sounds. And it’s what we did. I did sort of the clicking sounds, humming sounds, consonant sounds, breathing, strange sounds.’

Blunt went on to reveal the team put one microphone by her mouth and another next to her throat to capture the sounds she was making before the sound designer ‘went away and created that weird sound’.

Not only does it make for a far more unnerving and impressive moment for audiences knowing that it was naturally generated, but it would have been tarnished for more for me had it been created instead with a simple prompt and click of a button – rather than human artistry.

If our biggest actors are going to command the biggest salaries it seems only fair that they facilitate every part of their own performance and aren’t to be seen to be taking any sort of shortcut.

Feathers were ruffled in similar fashion when it was revealed AI had been used to ‘smooth out’ the Hungarian of non-native speakers Adrian Brody and Felicity Jones in The Brutalist, with the film’s editor, Dávid Jancsó, using AI tech from Respeecher to tweak specific sounds in the actors’ dialogue after the usual technique of Automated Dialogue Replacement (ADR) was felt to have fallen short.

However, both actors initially put all the hard work in with the notoriously tricky language in the first place, rather than rely on AI to do it before them – which I think is an important distinction.

Old-fashioned it may be, but in my mind, time and effort are still something measurable – and often important – when it comes to judging the artistry of a movie.

If an environment-compromising technology did the hard work for you, especially when it wasn’t strictly unachievable by humans in the first place, then I can’t help but feel short-changed.

Unsurprisingly Blunt’s director Spielberg is no fan of AI either – despite his 2001 movie A.I. Artificial Intelligence with Haley Joel Osment and Jude Law, when this form of technology was still more science fiction than reality.

Last year, per Reuters, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial director Spielberg confirmed he had yet to use AI on any of his films so far, though he was open to potential use of it behind-the-scenes, in strictly non-creative functions like budgeting or planning.

‘I don’t want to use it in front of the camera right now,’ Spielberg said at the time. ‘Not quite yet.’

The 79-year-old filmmaker appeared to double down on his wariness around AI last week during an episode of Michelle Obama’s podcast IMO as he said he didn’t ‘believe there is any substitute for the soul’ while recognising the tech’s effectiveness in the medical field.

‘I think a computer that thinks it feels more than we feel is anathema to the way I was raised and how I’ll practice my own trade of producing and directing in the future,’ Spielberg added, saying that AI shouldn’t have ‘the final word on anything creative’.

‘If AI wants to help me find locations, that’s great. Saves us all a lot of legwork. But don’t tell me that I don’t have the right antagonist in this movie. Don’t tell me how to write my dialogue for this character. Don’t tell me where the camera has to go.’

And while he’s okay if AI crops up as one option in ‘a large tool chest’ of many others for a production designer, it sounds like he’s keeping it at arm’s length.

For the sake of our summer blockbuster season, I’m glad to hear it.

Disclosure Day is released in cinemas on Friday, June 12.

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