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Legendary Simpsons voice actor Hank Azaria has a long article in the NY Times about the impact of AI on voice acting:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/02/04/opinion/simpsons-hank-azaria-voice-acting-AI.html
It’s (mostly) behind a paywall, but the TLDR is that AI can’t replicate the real depth and emotion of a human voice actor, and the article has a lot of mini-videos of Azaria explaining what he means.
It’s an affable sentiment, sure, and he is obviously super-talented, but I couldn’t help but think of an ostrich with its head in the sand. Even today, easy-to-access AI voices from e.g. ElevenLabs are already as close-to-perfect as they need to be for 90% of the typical use cases. And they are getting better by the day.
This kind of symbolizes to me how a lot of (most?) people still don’t “get it” — AI is replacing more and more trad-jobs at a rapid clip (translator, copywriter, paralegal, etc.), and it shows no signs of slowing down. It reminds me of how people used to say that digital cameras will never replace analogue film, because of [long list of fuzzy feel-good qualities similar to the ones Azaria mentions in his article].
Kind of sad, I guess, but also kind of exhilarating.
submitted by /u/fotogneric
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