Hank Azaria
Actor and Voice Artist
The Emmy-winning voice of Moe, Chief Wiggum and 100-plus Simpsons characters, who warned in a 2025 New York Times essay that AI could replicate his voices without consent — but never the “humanness” behind them.
In his words
A.I. can make the sound, but it will still need people to make the performance.
There’s so much of who I am that goes into creating a voice. How can the computer conjure all that?
Biography
Hank Azaria (born 1964) has voiced more than a hundred characters on The Simpsons since 1989 — Moe Szyslak, Chief Wiggum, Comic Book Guy, Professor Frink — winning multiple Emmys for a body of vocal work with few equals in television history. That archive is also, he realized, a perfect AI training set.
The essay: sound versus performance
In a February 2025 guest essay for The New York Times, Azaria wrote that he imagines AI “will be able to recreate the sounds” of the voices he built over almost four decades — with thirty-six seasons of Moe alone to learn from. “So, if I’m being honest, I am a little worried,” he wrote. “This is my job. This is what I love to do, and I don’t want to have to stop doing it.” Stealing anyone’s likeness or sound, he added, “seems just plain wrong.”
But the essay’s heart was a craftsman’s argument: a voice is not just a sound. Azaria described running in place, handling props, and working up real tears in the booth — physical, emotional labor a synthesized voice skips entirely. For a machine to understand on its own what is moving and what is funny, he wrote, “the A.I. would have to be alive.”
Azaria’s warning carries the credibility of someone who has already renegotiated his relationship to his own characters — he stepped away from voicing Apu in 2020 after a long controversy over the character — and who speaks for a voice-acting profession that has organized against unconsented cloning.
Where they stand in the war
Who backs them up
Sources & further reading
Canonical record: https://battlelines.ai/topic/hank-azaria