New Deal with His Estate Revives Stan Lee Using AI
Stan Lee is being brought back and even true believers are having a hard time with it. Tech company ElevenLabs made a deal with the late comic book pioneer’s estate to add the icon to their library of famous faces for the resurrection of his voice and likeness in future projects.
A cloned voice (how ironic for the creator of Spider-Man) that strongly resembles Lee’s is now part of ElevenLabs’s “Iconic Marketplace.” Through there and the Eleven Reader app, the voice can be licensed for audiobooks, and not just Stan The Man’s forte of comics, back issues, and graphic novels.
If you want to hear a facsimile of him read a classic tale like Treasure Island, you can as part of a new series entitled the Stan Lee Book Club of the Month. And that’s not all: “Lee’s voice” will also be available for commercial use in ads, films, and video games.
Other creative tools include AI-generated comic panels featuring his illustrated likeness and custom templates using his voice and mannerisms. Even though this endeavor has the consent of an excited Stan Lee Universe, Stan himself – having passed in 2018 well before generative AI was breaking ground and crossing lines – is not around to acknowledge it or give his blessings.
Fans on social media and in forums are already calling ElevenLabs’s move here “vile” and “creepy.” It’s likewise been compared to dystopian Orwellian sci-fi, a la Black Mirror. Other comments argue Lee is being exploited or viewed as product over being human.
There is a tangled and scary precedent for this. Lee took his former business partners at Pow! Entertainment to court before he died for doing something similar to ElevenLabs – trying to take advantage of him and steal his likeness. The lawsuit was dropped for reasons that still aren’t entirely clear.
In his final years, Stan Lee was the alleged victim of all kinds of misdeeds including elder abuse, fraud, and embezzlement perpetrated by business managers of dubious character – one of whom was charged with drawing the man’s blood to stamp on collectibles.
He didn’t have a choice then or now to be regenerated with AI, but some celebrities are getting ahead of the game, such as Michael Caine, David Hasselhoff, and Matthew McConaughey, who all gave consent to be part of the Marketplace long after they are gone from this mortal coil.
