For as long as there have been Simpsons, mankind has pondered what they’d look like if they walked amongst us. Not as simplistic, googly-eyed, yellow-skinned cartoon characters, but as living, breathing human beings.
People have tried to fancast a live-action Simpsons movie for decades. Notable names like John Goodman, Ben Affleck, Danny McBride, Kevin James, Hardy Rawls, and even Dan Castellaneta have been bandied about as potential candidates to take on the lead role of Homer Simpson. As talented as those thespians may be, however, they would always be imperfect impostors. No, we want to know what Homer would look like in real life, not a real-life man wearing a Homer costume.
There are a number of factors to consider when contemplating a realistic version of Homer Simpson. What is the real-world analogue to the two croquet hoops of hair that crown his cranium? What would his five o’clock shadow look like without cartoonish abstraction? What is the texture of his white polo shirt? And what about his eyes, those windows to the soul? Would his glimmering blue irises still feel as recognizable to us as the simple black dots that grace our televisions? These are the questions that pervade our thoughts as we go about our ho-hum, mundane existence.
Some remarkable artists working in multiple mediums have attempted to take on this task. Their depictions of what Homer Simpson would look like in real life are wonderful, intriguing, and sometimes scary. As incredible as they may be, these works will nevertheless always be constrained by the skill level of the artist, their subjectivity, and their breadth of influences. We can – nay, we must – go further.
With the advent of artificial intelligence, we can now harness the combined power and computational knowledge of thousands of supercomputers trawling through trillions of terabytes of images to generate a realistic Homer. Yes, with just a few lines of text and a click of the computer mouse, we can glimpse upon the true visage of Homer Jay Simpson, the hero of Evergreen Terrace, the paterfamilias of Animation Domination.
Unfortunately, the AI system said we didn’t have enough tokens to generate the image. It seems that Realistic Homer Simpson is, for now, reserved for God’s eyes only.