“I think I would choose a successor [instead of AI], and I’ll tell you why — because AI has no heart and I think that’s a missing ingredient,” Cartwright said when asked about her potential retirement. “[AI] might sound pretty close to Nancy Cartwright, but I got passion. We’re spiritual beings, we can emote passion and uplift people and stuff. And I don’t know that a computer can do something like that.”
Cartwright’s comments echo similar ones made by co-star Hank Azaria last year. “If A.I. tries to recreate one of my voices, what will the lack of humanness sound like? How big will the difference be?” he wrote in a New York Times op-ed at the time. Shortly thereafter, Azaria played with some of the AI and determined that it couldn’t yet replicate his voices, at least not to the quality you’d want if you were going to use the tech over a real actor. (Not for nothing, a good portion of the cast’s voices have changed over the 36 years The Simpsons has been on the air—another point for the humanness of their work.) But that was also before Disney entered into a partnership with OpenAI and announced plans to add AI-generated shortform videos to Disney+, which would presumably allow for customers to generate clips featuring Bart Simpson. Even if The Simpsons eventually ends up with a new Bart, it’s not hard to imagine that Fortnite never will.
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