Harry Shearer, for one, does not welcome our new AI overlords

Promoting his musical about—you guessed it—J. Edgar Hoover, Shearer pinpoints the causes of Hollywood's AI takeover: Hype and vulnerability.

By Matt Schimkowitz  |  July 7, 2026 | 1:25pm
Photo: Frinkiac
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Harry Shearer, for one, does not welcome our new AI overlords

Harry Shearer’s vocal cords must be exhausted. After approximately six millennia voicing half the town of Springfield on The Simpsons, the multi-hyphenate performer would likely rather be churning out episodes of Le Show, the radio program he’s shepherded for the last 45 years, and writing a musical about J. Edgar Hoover than voicing Principal Skinner for a lucrative sum. So you’d think that he’d welcome the AI assist. Well, serves you right for assuming, because Shearer is actually not impressed by the technology’s “sophisticated form of mimicry.” As to whether he’d let a sycophantic hallucination-and-plagiarism machine voice one of his beloved characters, he thinks it’s a “good idea” to trademark names and likenesses, à la Taylor Swift and Matthew McConaughey. “The problem I see with it is it’s all just a very sophisticated form of mimicry,” he continues. “It’s just statistically one word following [another].”

Speaking to Variety, Shearer also shared a lucid breakdown of the desperation facing both the AI industry’s boosters, who “are so desperate to raise money,” and modern Hollywood, which is at a “weak time in the post-COVID period.” To Shearer, that’s the time to inject some newfound originality into the mix.

“People who know more about it than I do attribute more of that to the aftermath of two really serious strikes than a few people that are diddling around with AI,” he says. “There are always waves in Hollywood. Me personally, I think I can get away with stuff are when the industry has sort of run out of steam on whatever they thought the formula was[…] The Marvel moment has passed, and you look at the great movies of the of the latter part of the 20th century, and they were in the late ’60s and early ’70s, when everybody was going, ‘I don’t know what these kids want to see.'”

What do the kids want to see? An FBI musical by Shearer and Tom Leopold, Here Comes J. Edgar, about the late FBI director’s lifelong affair with his deputy Clyde Tolson. Gen Alpha will have three words for J. Edgar: “Dat bih gah.”

 
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