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In a moving essay in The New York Times, voice actor Hank Azaria expressed his fear that AI would one day be used to keep The Simpsons going forever. With almost 40 years of episodes under its belt, The Simpsons could provide a system with a lot of training data. What’s to stop corporations from resurrecting Azaria and the rest of the cast after death and using them forever?
Nothing, of course. It’s already happening. Peter Cushing’s Grand Moff Tarkin will walk around in Star Wars films as long as it’s profitable. James Earl Jones signed away the rights to his voice before his death, meaning Darth Vader may never die or change. Last year The Beatles released a number one single decades after the death of John Lennon, thanks to AI. Unscrupulous monsters fed all of George Carlin’s specials into an LLM and had it spit out a middling imitation of his work.
The computerized recreations are almost good. Almost. But they lack something. “If A.I. tries to recreate one of my voices, what will the lack of humanness sound like?” Azarisa said in his Times op-ed. “How big will the difference be? I honestly don’t know, but I think it will be enough, at least in the near term, that we’ll notice something is off, in the same way that we notice something’s amiss in a subpar film or TV show.”
During an acceptance speech at the Saturn Awards this week, actor Nicolas Cage warned his fellow actors against signing their lives away to AI systems. “The job of all art in my view, film performance included, is to hold a mirror to the external and internal stories of the human condition through the very human thoughtful and emotional process of recreation,” he said. “A robot cannot do that. If we let robots do that, it will lack all heart and eventually lose the edge and turn to mush. There will be no human response to life as we know it. It will be life as robots tell us to know it.”
Cage told the Associated Press something similar in 2024.
Azaria also spoke to the seductive nature of the promise of the technology. We’d all love to hear a new Beatles album or a new Carlin special. Azaria misses Bugs Bunny. “I miss dearly Mel Blanc’s old Bugs Bunny performances,” he said. “We’ll never get them again. But maybe with A.I., we can have more of them. Maybe it would work especially well if someone like me, who is intimately familiar with the subtleties of the character, could help recreate what Bugs Bunny was doing by essentially directing A.I.”
That seduction is a trap, however. Jones is dead. Cushing is dead. The Simpsons are almost 40 years old and the voices of some of the actors are giving out. The Beatles are gone. Carlin is gone. The world moves on and more art comes in to replace it. Things change. That’s good.
We have the tools now to capture our pop culture icons in amber and resurrect them over and over again, forever. That’s a nightmare. One we should reject it.
