How would you feel about AI being used for deceased voice actors?

[Vegeta th3 4th]

i.e. This isn't a case of "jobs of one type being replaced by jobs of another type". Its a case of "an entire field of jobs disappearing entirely, to be replaced by nothing".

So many people will only understand this when it's them being kicked out of the door, but by then it will be too late to do anything about it.

[JulieYBM]

Creating the next Avatar: The Last Airbender seems like such a lowbar to set, in large part because it's such a flawed series. I'm inspired by insane shit when with my writing (Twin Peaks, national new stories about missing women, Evangelion, fertility issues, disabilities, self-loathing, aimlessness, mental illness, self-destruction).

Not to be hoity-toity, but the big focus that people have on world building as their reason for wanting to get into creating art is so boring to me. I wanna know about the human element! World building stuff shouldn't be the main thrust of a work, it should be a tool for highlighting the characters and themes.

Things AI could never effectively understand and innovate with.

[MasenkoHA]

Creating the next Avatar: The Last Airbender seems like such a lowbar to set, in large part because it's such a flawed series. I'm inspired by insane shit when with my writing (Twin Peaks, national new stories about missing women, Evangelion, fertility issues, disabilities, self-loathing, aimlessness, mental illness, self-destruction).

Not to be hoity-toity, but the big focus that people have on world building as their reason for wanting to get into creating art is so boring to me. I wanna know about the human element! World building stuff shouldn't be the main thrust of a work, it should be a tool for highlighting the characters and themes.

Things AI could never effectively understand and innovate with.

I’m all for people being inspired by whatever to get into acting, filmmaking, animation, writing, directing whatever. Even if it’s from a kid show on Nickelodeon.

I agree with Kunzait that it has become an issue with fans thinking like a brain dead ceo executive.

Like, whenever the inevitable “Will Dragon Ball work in live action?” pops up there’s always some chucklefucks saying things like “But CHINESE MARKET!” “insert movie based on IP that kind of reminds me of Dragon Ball bombed in the box office so Dragon Ball will fail!” “We must skip ahead to the Saiyan saga like Funimation did because nobody cared about pre-Raditz Dragon Ball.


Create art, consume art. But don’t act like it’s your job to figure out how to sell Goku action figures.

[Jord]

It's too bad some people don't see the value of using AI as a tool. Digital colorization of animation is also a tool used to increase possibilities in animation. Guess we should have balked against that too, when it put cell painters out of job.

There's a difference between using AI as a tool, and having it take over a job completely. We are now seeing thousands of people around the world lose their jobs to AI and automation; that's not a tool, it's an outright replacement of the human worker.

Just like how digital colorization took over a lot of job of cell painters.

[Kunzait_83]

Creating the next Avatar: The Last Airbender seems like such a lowbar to set, in large part because it's such a flawed series.

I was simply pulling from titles that were actually oft-cited by most average users on this forum back in the mid to late-2000s: do not remotely mistake that for me endorsing those titles. I've always found stuff like Avatar, the DCAU, Gargoyles (another popular go-to fave for people around these parts back then) and so on, to be fucking deathly boring and uninteresting as hell, and I've never exactly been shy about saying it.

Though that being said, my other point was that as much as I find the whole kids' media fixation thing to be greatly unhealthy in general, even being primarily inspired by those things to want to be an artist of some kind is still IMMENSELY healthier and preferable to just wanting to emulate a studio executive instead.

Like, whenever the inevitable “Will Dragon Ball work in live action?” pops up there’s always some chucklefucks saying things like “But CHINESE MARKET!”

The bottomless irony of the "live action Dragon Ball can NEVER WORK!" folks citing fucking China of all places as being one of their big reasons, despite China being home to more than 100 years' worth of the EXACT kinds of live action wuxia films that inspired Dragon Ball to begin with, will never not be rich as hell.

"The Chinese market will never accept X, Y, or Z aspect of a live action Dragon Ball!"

My dudes, the Chinese film landscape literally INVENTED most of Dragon Ball's tropes and iconography back in the fucking silent film era and have only ran with and evolved them all in all the years since then.

Just like how digital colorization took over a lot of job of cell painters.

You're either:

1) Not reading what's being said here at all

2) Reading it, but not understanding it

or 3) You're just trolling and being purposefully thick.

Digital colorist is still a job that people have.

You're citing an example of one type of job (cel painter) being replaced by another type of job (digital colorist). We're talking about whole fields of different jobs (set designers, lighting techs, costumers, writers, etc. and so on) all being wiped out and replaced with NOTHING. Just a lone studio monkey inputting a prompt and an AI algorithm shitting out a new movie or TV show from wholecloth.

Which again, while that's not the reality today (and hopefully/likely never will be), that's the directly stated end goal that studio executives are interested in AI eventually evolving towards someday in the near future. Which as I said earlier, the studio heads even having that stated end-goal and being confident in it enough to state it publicly and repeatedly, is still a bad precedent for us to be under in itself.

[Dr. Casey]

In the article about the Chicago Sun-Times, no mention is made of the AI program that was used (might have been a lower-tier model). I use AI extensively enough; fabrications are rare, especially if the Search function is turned on so that the AI sources everything it says. Hallucinating two-thirds of the books listed is just... not a thing that happens with 2025-era AI, so either he was using an older program, or a free-to-use non-SOTA program, or there's something else the article isn't telling us. The idea that AI is highly unreliable is kind of an outdated idea that stopped being true at some point during 2024. AI's helped me out an incredible amount on numerous different things and reduced the stress in my life tremendously (more than almost any human being honestly, who have generally done nothing but add to stress rather than subtract from it), and anyone who's opposed to it due either to ethical opposition or falsely downplaying its capabilities might be in for a bad time since it's not going anywhere, and the already-incorrect idea that it's incapable or unreliable is rapidly becoming more and more incorrect. Probably on a monthly basis, certainly on a quarterly one. On a yearly basis, it advances quickly enough that it's like having a console generation upgrade each year.

[JulieYBM]

Creating the next Avatar: The Last Airbender seems like such a lowbar to set, in large part because it's such a flawed series. I'm inspired by insane shit when with my writing (Twin Peaks, national new stories about missing women, Evangelion, fertility issues, disabilities, self-loathing, aimlessness, mental illness, self-destruction).

Not to be hoity-toity, but the big focus that people have on world building as their reason for wanting to get into creating art is so boring to me. I wanna know about the human element! World building stuff shouldn't be the main thrust of a work, it should be a tool for highlighting the characters and themes.

Things AI could never effectively understand and innovate with.

I’m all for people being inspired by whatever to get into acting, filmmaking, animation, writing, directing whatever. Even if it’s from a kid show on Nickelodeon.

I agree with Kunzait that it has become an issue with fans thinking like a brain dead ceo executive.

Like, whenever the inevitable “Will Dragon Ball work in live action?” pops up there’s always some chucklefucks saying things like “But CHINESE MARKET!” “insert movie based on IP that kind of reminds me of Dragon Ball bombed in the box office so Dragon Ball will fail!” “We must skip ahead to the Saiyan saga like Funimation did because nobody cared about pre-Raditz Dragon Ball.


Create art, consume art. But don’t act like it’s your job to figure out how to sell Goku action figures.

I definitely agree with you on that. It's exhausting simply from my perspective as a Woman Posting On Internet Forum that forum users approach art like they're CEOs or corporate executives. We should be approaching the creation of art first as creators, then from there pushing to make that art a reality. Executives are never the model to be looking at.

I know that I'm a broken record, but I really do think more people should create art and not just discuss other people's art. It'll give you such a richer understanding of all art in general and really make your ability to criticize art sharper.

[Kunzait_83]

The idea that AI is highly unreliable is kind of an outdated idea that stopped being true at some point during 2024.

This statement in itself is factually incorrect. Most recent studies have shown that AI fabricating false data has actually gotten worse in the past few years. And that in many cases its done the exact opposite of making workloads more efficient in many fields.

And furthermore, more and more researchers are coming to the conclusion that AI hallucinations/fabrications will never be fully ironed out or eliminated, making IMO the tech not really especially dependable or reliable for some of the most important applications that are being pushed for it.

From just 2024 and 2025:

McDonalds halts replacing drive-thru tellers with AI due to AI constantly messing up people's orders.

Grok AI falsely accused an NBA player of criminal vandalism based on it misinterpreting a joke as fact.

Microsoft AI MyCity gave New York business owners faulty legal information that would have lead to them breaking the law.

A constant repeating issue of lawyers using AI to cite completely fabricated court cases that never happened to use as legal precedent that's still happening even this year.

The AI transcript tool Whisper has been constantly hallucinating and fabricating entire conversations between doctors and medical researchers that have never taken place.

Apple's iphone AI has been flagged for constant false/fabricated news alerts as recently as this past January.

The Trump administration's Health and Human Services recently used OpenAI to cite fabricated health studies that did not exist.

2024 and 2025 have both also seen a significant uptick in AI that's programmed to cater to people's personal biases and only tell them what they want to hear.

Some choice examples (Trigger Warning: potentially disturbing content in these examples):

Spoiler:

This has helped lead to at least a few instances of AI encouraged/assisted suicide both successful and otherwise.

And as far as ethical concerns with AI that go beyond just its dangerous unreliability, there's the pesky fact that the energy requirements to meet the increasing power demands of AI are only further hastening the planet and the human race towards climate Armageddon.

Not to mention unethical (frankly just straight up comic book villain-level Evil) military applications, like Israel using the AI Lavender to help inflict a genocide on an entire people/populace, and even going as far to help import it out to other foreign militaries globally for similar use.

Or the horrendously negative impact that its been having on critical thinking, education, and school at even the most remedial level, one that teachers have been repeatedly trying to warn people about for some time now.

And of course lets not even get into the can of worms that is many of the very same tech CEO's, AI programmers, and silicon valley leaders (i.e. the very same people creating and disseminating this tech to the public in the first place) who have come to view AI in doomsday cult-like fundamentalist religious terms, and have become megalomaniacal and psychotic enough to view AI as ending the need for human bodies entirely.

This is all just the very tip of the iceberg still. There ARE some positive applications for AI of course, but they are absolutely small-scale and petty when compared to the utterly deranged and outwardly dystopic uses for it that are vastly more important and prevalent to humanity's wellbeing as a whole.

I don't doubt that its personally had a positive impact and effect on you Casey, and I'm genuinely glad to hear that as a friend: but I cannot help but look at the broader whole of what AI is currently being largely used for (and WHY its being used for those things) in aggregate, and the harm that its both already done and continues to do to so many people, and come to the conclusion that this shit just isn't worth the tradeoffs and downsides.

[ABED]

But while I'm at it, as much as I agree that studio execs are trying to get AI to be just good enough that people will pay enough to make it profitable and it won't lead to any great art, I also thing audiences are also partially to blame. My niece and nephew visited my parents about a year ago and they didn't watch any TV shows. They just watched inane youtubers. I get the appeal of watching things Let's Play videos, but it's hard to justify studios paying millions for even mid range budget films like they used to make when audiences are fine sitting home watching people with uninformed opinions yell in videos longer than the movies they are supposedly mad about.

I just want to note that the death of mid-budget mainstream films is a topic that I've had a great deal of interest in and have read and studied up on extensively for literally decades now. And I can say very definitively that this has been a problem that WELL long predates the rise of streaming, Youtube Let's Plays, and so on. Hell, it well predates Gen Z as a media-consuming cohort.

The death of mainstream mid-budget films has been an ongoing phenomenon going all the way back to the early to mid 2000s (which is also back when I first started following this issue myself). While streaming and celebrity Youtubers have certainly helped exacerbate that issue, they are in no way the direct, root cause of it.

The real root of that issue has always been due to rising inflation overall, as well as the studio filmmaking model radically altering its structure entirely to depend on global, multi-billion dollar opening weekend earnings from massive, bloated tentpole films, rather than overall earnings from broader theatrical runs or home video sales.

That problem started a LONG time before streaming and Youtube were really a significant factor in anything - hell, it even started right smack during the heyday of home DVD releases at their financial apex - and it visibly and significantly impacted the amount of mid-budget studio output in wide release going all the way back to when I first started college at 18 (which was noticeable enough back then that it got me so interested in this topic in the first place, from the standpoint of someone who's favorite mainstream movies growing up in the 80s and 90s tended to range from the low to mid-budget). I'm 41 now, so do the math.

I've actually done quite a bit of studying on this myself. I can see where you would read my post as implying AI would get rid of the mid-range budget film when in fact it's pretty much dead and has been for awhile. I was more making the point that most pricy films will gone and won't come back. Big budget films (usually based on IP) are a tad safer but only to a point.

Even if the VA's are okay with it, I still have issues with it. Obviously it's a shameless cash grab and I guess I don't have as big of an issue with family members getting while the getting's good, It's very uncanny valley and distracting. A new voice can be distracting too, but at least it's human.

[Hellspawn28]

I hate AI for art, writing, music, and acting. But, I think AI and machines can be helpful for something's (like building buildings), but never to replace artists.

You need human architects to create buildings, too. Not only is it an art unto itself, but it’s a safety issue and a matter of responsibility. Who is responsible for damage and death if decisions are made by AI?

If robots get hurt or die, they can, they be rebuilt or replace. You can't do that with humans. You can have humans build the blueprints of designs and let the construction work for the machines. I think you can have a nice balance between both (just not drawing, acting, writing, music, etc). We just need to live in a world without money being an issue because you should not need money to survive. The idea of that you need to buy stuff and pay rent is capitalist BS.

[BootyCheeksJohnson]

Hard no. Dragon Ball has already had to recast legacy characters. We've had 2 Mister Satan's and 3 Muten Roshi's already, and people seem to have embraced them just fine.
Daima has set a new precedent for who can voice these characters as well.
Also I know about the Nozawa AI thing, but she's just allowing her voice to be used to train an Alexa/Siri type of thing. She's never signed off on being okay with using AI to artificially recreate her Goku voice.

[Dbzfan94]

Absolutely 100% against. It’s actually shocking and honestly disheartening to see so many in this thread want AI to take over DB.

[Vegeta th3 4th]

It’s actually shocking and honestly disheartening to see so many in this thread want AI to take over DB.

It's not just Dragon Ball; people want AI and automation to be in everything, not realizing that it will hurt them as well. The whole purpose of AI and automation is to eliminate jobs, but for some reason people don't seem to see this.

[Grimlock]

Absolutely 100% against. It’s actually shocking and honestly disheartening to see so many in this thread want AI to take over DB.

I was absolutely taken aback negatively when a thread on this very forum showed more people in favor of a "good cast of voice" instead of an accurate dub. We are living in dangerous and dark times. We can only brace ourselves for what's to come...

[jjgp1112]

I approve of AI being used as I want Dragon Ball to continue.

I do not want Dragon Ball to stop. Why should only the 1980/1990s kids have the privilege of watching a new Dragon Ball show as it is being made? That's unfair and selfish.

Share your toys and let new generations get their own Dragon Ball shows to grew up with too, instead of only that old 1990 series.

Because things begin, things end, and the world keeps spinning? THis might sound trivial, but at the end of the day, it's just a show. Everything ends at some point, and at some point you have to be able to let it go. Who cares if other generations can't experience it? There should be NEW things that gve people that same feeling that Dragon Ball did. I'm 32 years old. My childhood was 20 years ago. It doesn't fucking matter anymore.

Unfair? Selfish? It's a fucking show. There should always be space for new shows. I think it's more selfish and unfair to insists the shit you liked as a kid should still take up space. Like granted, I've always personally had a fascination with old shit, but man, if Looney Tunes and Tom & Jerry and all that old Hannah Barbera shit was the majority of available options to 10 year-old me in 2002? That's a fucking nightmare. Let the kids have their shit and let your shit be a product of the time you lived. It's better that way!

Part of the reaosn AI has this weird, dumb enthusiasm behind it is because we live in a culture of nostalgia now that has bordered on necromancy; people don't realize how fucking it weird it is to still be obsessed with the iconography of their childhood so the chance to experience it again, no matter how bleak and ethically dubious, is like "Yes, awesome! I loved the voice narrating the old NBA on NBC packages! Bring it back!" and it's like..."Why not just find a new voice?" It's making it even easier for corporations to just keep feeding nostalgia to us and too many are falling for it.

(Having fiddled around with Chat GPT out of boredom...it's still in a place where, creatively, you have to force feed it so much shit to make it even slightly competent at telling a story that if you have even 5% of an actual creative, storytelling brain, you will quickly realize you're just better off doing it yourself anyway. And I think it will probably remain that way)

This thread is Hell incarnate.

Well I imagine Jord is just deliberately going with the worst take possible to rage bait, as usual, but yeah, even still.

[JulieYBM]

Not to wax poetic on main, but:

Lately, I've thought about how difficult it must be to be a parent. As someone who loves the arts, it would be a nightmare scenario to never be able to teach a child to love the arts and the rewarding feelings that come with appreciating and creating art.

This AI shit—and the cultish support for it in so many places—really does run in opposition to all that. I'd be ashamed of myself for raising someone who saw AI as some sort of acceptable experience and replacement for acting doing the creative work necessary to create a piece of art.

[Vegeta th3 4th]

There should be NEW things that gave people that same feeling that Dragon Ball did. Let the kids have their shit and let your shit be a product of the time you lived. It's better that way!

Yes, this, so much. Back when Dragon Ball concluded, Shonen Jump moved on to other series; they left the past behind. Hunter X Hunter, Naruto, One Piece, and Bleach, among others, were allowed to shine bright as a result of Dragon Ball and its contemporaries being allowed to end. Fans back then had no issue moving on as well, trying out new series as they aired/were published, resulting in many series becoming successful classics in their own right. People's unwillingness to move on now is not only hurting the product they love, it's also hurting the chances of other potentially great products from seeing the light of day. Outside of a few anniversary projects here and there, Dragon Ball should've properly concluded once Goku flew off with Uub and when Toriyama put down his pen back in 1995. Fans' refusal to move on resulted in GT and Super, shows made by people who didn't understand what made Toriyama's original work so great. You'd think that the issues that filled those series would be enough to convince fans to move on, but no, they want AI to take over instead.

Lately, I've thought about how difficult it must be to be a parent. As someone who loves the arts, it would be a nightmare scenario to never be able to teach a child to love the arts and the rewarding feelings that come with appreciating and creating art.

This AI shit—and the cultish support for it in so many places—really does run in opposition to all that. I'd be ashamed of myself for raising someone who saw AI as some sort of acceptable experience and replacement for acting doing the creative work necessary to create a piece of art.

It's not only art that's being hurt by AI, education outcomes are as well. You've got students from all over the world relying on AI to do their work for them, resulting in a major loss of actual learning. Do students today even know how to put an essay together ? We're slowly becoming a society that no longer wants to put effort into anything, instead relying on tech to do everything for us. The sad thing is, more and more people see this as a good thing.

[Majin Buu]

Yes, this, so much. Back when Dragon Ball concluded, Shonen Jump moved on to other series; they left the past behind. Hunter X Hunter, Naruto, One Piece, and Bleach, among others, were allowed to shine bright as a result of Dragon Ball and its contemporaries being allowed to end. Fans back then had no issue moving on as well, trying out new series as they aired/were published, resulting in many series becoming successful classics in their own right. People's unwillingness to move on now is not only hurting the product they love, it's also hurting the chances of other potentially great products from seeing the light of day. Outside of a few anniversary projects here and there, Dragon Ball should've properly concluded once Goku flew off with Uub and when Toriyama put down his pen back in 1995. Fans' refusal to move on resulted in GT and Super, shows made by people who didn't understand what made Toriyama's original work so great. You'd think that the issues that filled those series would be enough to convince fans to move on, but no, they want AI to take over instead.

I agree with everything except the bolded part. As silly as Kaioshin25's post was, I think the blame for not wanting to move on from Dragon Ball should be placed more on Dragon Ball's IP holders than fans as it's the IP holders that ultimately determine if Dragon Ball continues or not. Fans like Kaioshin25 just give them a convenient excuse to keep the franchise going, and in turn, foster this wrong idea that Dragon Ball needs to be everlasting.

[JulieYBM]

Yes, this, so much. Back when Dragon Ball concluded, Shonen Jump moved on to other series; they left the past behind. Hunter X Hunter, Naruto, One Piece, and Bleach, among others, were allowed to shine bright as a result of Dragon Ball and its contemporaries being allowed to end. Fans back then had no issue moving on as well, trying out new series as they aired/were published, resulting in many series becoming successful classics in their own right. People's unwillingness to move on now is not only hurting the product they love, it's also hurting the chances of other potentially great products from seeing the light of day. Outside of a few anniversary projects here and there, Dragon Ball should've properly concluded once Goku flew off with Uub and when Toriyama put down his pen back in 1995. Fans' refusal to move on resulted in GT and Super, shows made by people who didn't understand what made Toriyama's original work so great. You'd think that the issues that filled those series would be enough to convince fans to move on, but no, they want AI to take over instead.

I agree with everything except the bolded part. As silly as Kaioshin25's post was, I think the blame for not wanting to move on from Dragon Ball should be placed more on Dragon Ball's IP holders than fans as it's the IP holders that ultimately determine if Dragon Ball continues or not. Fans like Kaioshin25 just give them a convenient excuse to keep the franchise going, and in turn, foster this wrong idea that Dragon Ball needs to be everlasting.

I'm sure that this is just me repeating, but yeah: the cancerous existence of capitalism requires constant, unnatural growth. This is why the original comic itself continued on and on and on, and why JUMP editors in general are generally ordered to keep a series going for as long as possible, even to the detriment of the health of the author and making an overall good comic.

AI isn't the answer, dismantling capitalism is.

[Vegeta th3 4th]

I think the blame for not wanting to move on from Dragon Ball should be placed more on Dragon Ball's IP holders than fans as it's the IP holders that ultimately determine if Dragon Ball continues or not. Fans like Kaioshin25 just give them a convenient excuse to keep the franchise going, and in turn, foster this wrong idea that Dragon Ball needs to be everlasting.

Both parties are to blame honestly. You've got fans who can't move on, and right holders who give them what they want, despite it hurting the IP's reputation. I do however agree with what you wrote.