When Adrien Brody won the 2025 Academy Award for The Brutalist, audiences had already accepted his Hungarian dialogue as an authentic performance. The subsequent revelation that Respeecher's voice conversion technology refined his pronunciation created a cognitive rupture — not in the performance itself, but in how creators and viewers understood authorship. This paper examines the dual cognitive negotiation that AI introduces into cinematic practice: first, the artist's and technician's experience of creative agency when generative tools intervene between intention and output; second, the audience's emotional engagement when disclosure reframes a performance previously received as wholly human. Drawing on craft epistemology, phenomenological accounts of artistic labor, and Mori's (1970) uncanny valley as reinterpreted through humanities scholarship on technological mediation, the study analyzes case studies from Hollywood and Indian cinema — where the Bachchan personality rights cases (2022–2025) reveal how "star value" encodes cognitive expectations about authentic presence. The paper argues that AI does not merely alter what audiences see but restructures how artists know their own work and how viewers construct meaning from performance. Findings contribute to humanities pedagogy by offering frameworks for teaching critical evaluation of creative authorship in an era of increasingly imperceptible human-machine collaboration.

Authors:
Krishnakumar VE, Lingaya University, United States
Kamal Upadhyay, Lingayas Vidyapeeth, India

About the Presenter(s)
Krishnakumar VE is a PhD scholar under Dr Kamal Upadhay. He works for Next G Leaders and Businesses with a goal of responsible and ethical AI to help people.

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