Expert Explains Why A.I. Can Never Replace the ‘Simpsons’ Voice Actors
The idea of generative artificial intelligence meddling with The Simpsons has been on a lot of people’s minds lately. The 36th season literally opened with an episode about how a sophisticated A.I. program creates the “perfect” series finale for the show, only to glitch out and reset, thus implying that The Simpsons may just go on forever and ever and ever…
More recently, Hank Azaria penned an op-ed for The New York Times, vociferously arguing against the use of A.I. voices in animation. While The Simpsons could, hypothetically, continue to produce content indefinitely using computerized recreations of his famous characters, and other residents of Springfield, Azaria says they shouldn’t.
Don't Miss
“A voice is not just a sound,” Azaria wrote. “And I’d like to think that no matter how much an A.I. version of Moe or Snake or Chief Wiggum will sound like my voice, something will still be missing — the humanness. There’s so much of who I am that goes into creating a voice. How can the computer conjure all that?”
Obviously Azaria has a vested interest in protecting his artistic legacy, not to mention keeping his job. But at least one other person has unequivocally backed up his thesis.
Fox News recently took a break from cheering on the systematic dismantling of American democracy to speak with “A.I. expert Marva Bailer,” and she confirmed that technology will never be able to fully replicate a human vocal performance. “When we look at animated characters, there is a person behind that character and there’s also a person behind the voice, because we identify the character with the image, but also that unique voice and voices aren’t just reading a script,” Bailer stated. “A voice has a personality to it and emotion and a connection. And so his point that he’s trying to make is he’s actually developing these characters over time, and he’s developing them through his life experience.”
According to Bailer, Azaria’s decades of experience aren’t a negative, they’re what make his vocal performances so inimitable: “He’s been doing this a very, very long time. And as he’s interacted with these characters, he developed new personalities and the ways that the characters react with each other and new characters that they meet, just like we do as humans. And so he does have a valid point.”
In other words, voice actors are still actors. There’s a soulfulness to the Simpsons voices even when they’re imperfect. Perhaps because they’re imperfect. Bailer did go on to suggest that A.I. could still be used to “fine-tune” the Simpsons actors’ vocal performances, but added that such a plan would need to be “transparent.”
Of course, that’s a slippery slope. If Azaria is allowed to use A.I. to modify his performances, what’s to stop him from attempting to use the technology to digitally remove himself from 1998’s Godzilla?
