Ha Ha, The Simpsons Has to Finish One Day, Proper? Proper??

In a shifting essay in The New York Instances, voice actor Hank Azaria expressed his fear that AI would sooner or later be used to maintain The Simpsons going eternally. With nearly 40 years of episodes underneath its belt, The Simpsons might present a system with lots of coaching information. What’s to cease companies from resurrecting Azaria and the remainder of the solid after loss of life and utilizing them eternally?

Nothing, in fact. It’s already taking place. Peter Cushing’s Grand Moff Tarkin will walk around in Star Wars movies so long as it’s worthwhile. James Earl Jones signed away the rights to his voice earlier than his loss of life, that means Darth Vader could never die or change. Final 12 months The Beatles launched a primary single many years after the loss of life 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 nearly good. Virtually. However they lack one thing. “If A.I. tries to recreate certainly one of my voices, what is going to the shortage of humanness sound like?” Azarisa mentioned in his Instances op-ed. “How large will the distinction be? I actually don’t know, however I believe it will likely be sufficient, no less than within the close to time period, that we’ll discover one thing is off, in the identical manner that we discover one thing’s amiss in a subpar movie or TV present.”

Throughout an acceptance speech on the Saturn Awards this week, actor Nicolas Cage warned his fellow actors in opposition to signing their lives away to AI methods. “The job of all artwork for my part, movie efficiency included, is to carry a mirror to the exterior and inside tales of the human situation by way of the very human considerate and emotional strategy of recreation,” he mentioned. “A robotic can not try this. If we let robots try this, it’ll lack all coronary heart and ultimately lose the sting and switch to mush. There will likely be no human response to life as we all know it. It is going to be life as robots inform us to comprehend it.”

Cage informed the Related Press something similar in 2024.

Azaria additionally spoke to the seductive nature of the promise of the know-how. We’d all love to listen to a brand new Beatles album or a brand new Carlin particular. Azaria misses Bugs Bunny. “I miss dearly Mel Blanc’s previous Bugs Bunny performances,” he mentioned. “We’ll by no means get them once more. However perhaps with A.I., we will have extra of them. Possibly it might work particularly properly if somebody like me, who’s intimately aware of the subtleties of the character, might assist recreate what Bugs Bunny was doing by basically directing A.I.”

That seduction is a lure, nevertheless. Jones is useless. Cushing is useless. The Simpsons are nearly 40 years previous and the voices of a few of the actors are giving out. The Beatles are gone. Carlin is gone. The world strikes on and extra artwork is available in to exchange it. Issues change. That’s good.

We’ve got the instruments now to seize our popular culture icons in amber and resurrect them over and over again, eternally. That’s a nightmare. One we must always reject it.