Personally, I feel sort of uncomfortable using AI voice clips for fanediting. The fact that we can now create new movie dialogue out of thin air, with no input from the original actors at all, feels sort of soulless to me. Call me a Luddite, but AI in general is a Pandora’s box that I’m not really comfortable opening.
If we’re going to change Jar-Jar’s dialogue, I think the classic “foreign dub with new subtitles” route is the best way to go about it. Sure, Jar-Jar does appear in later canon material, but you can just assume he learned English in between movies (which would explain his dialect).
That’s fair. I also agree that replacing all of a character’s dialogue with AI feels weird, and if someone were to go the route of redubbing Jar Jar, it should be with a real voice actor (just like a foreign dub of a movie).
Personally for me, I think AI should work as a tool to make possible things that wouldn’t have been possible otherwise. For example, JJ had a bunch of deleted scenes of Leia from The Force Awakens that he wanted to use in TROS but probably couldn’t because the dialogue didn’t work with the new plot. If a line of AI dialogue would have allowed that scene to be used (along with shots of Carrie’s real performance), I imagine that JJ would have done it. To make a deleted scene work in Restructured/Starlight, I ended up mashing together several of Leia’s lines with new mouth movements, but that allowed for the inclusion of my favorite Leia character moment in all of the sequels, one that absolutely deserved to be in the movie.
So yes, AI is a tool, and it is up to us to use to use it to enable more human performances and storytelling, not to impoverish them.