Roiland, whose exit from the Adult Swim series was announced in January in light of domestic abuse charges, had voiced the title characters since its 2013 launch.
Not sure any AI could handle voicing the two main characters of a show (yet), but the ongoing strikes and all do have me worry for the future of the profession.
This is why you don’t short yourself on voice actors and make only one do them all. Hinging your entire success off of one and only one person brings and creates it’s own risks.
He explicitly said risks. If Seth MacFarlane could no longer be used as a voice actor for whatever reason, Family Guy would have been in very big trouble.
Why does the concept of risk need to be explained?
Black and white thinking is all the rage these days. There is no "risk," it either "always is" or "always isn't." We did away with "sometimes" when we threw out "nuance."
It shouldn't be a problem, there are some really good Justin Roiland soundalikes, and it's not like Rick's voice hasn't changed over the course of the show anyways.
The harder part will be finding someone with the right comedic timing. That's Roiland's bigger contribution to the show
Comedic timing doesn't matter when it's prerecorded. Hell, even Roiland ran out of material after one Interdimentional Cable episode. That shit is the writers jobs. And between Roiland and Harmon, Dan is the faaaaar better writer.
Comedic timing still matters. The cadence of the sentence when you're delivering a punchline matters, and yeah, you can do dozens of takes until it's right, but they're not going to want to do that.
To be clear, I do think it will be fine. They will find someone who can fill the role(s) well. It's just not going to be as easy as recasting, say, War Machine in Iron Man was. They'll need to find the right guy, but they will find him