Legendary Marvel artist and writer Stan Lee was allegedly a victim of elder abuse in his final years, as he was reportedly taken advantage of by business managers. Now, even in death, he is being used for other people’s profit, as AI nutjobs are dragging his metaphorical corpse out of the earth to use a mock-up of his voice and likeness.
ElevenLabs, an AI-driven speech synthesis company, has entered an agreement with Stan Lee Universe to replicate Lee’s likeness and voice as part of its ElevenLabs Iconic Marketplace. This is a collection of the voices and likenesses of famous people, including actors Michael Caine, Judy Garland, and David Hasselhoff. The agreement also puts Lee’s likeness in its visual generator, allowing users to create comic book panels starring the late writer.
The company is also using this deal to create a new monthly series called “Stan Lee Book Club of the Month,” in which the AI will use Lee’s voice to narrate a different book every month, with the first being Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island.
“Stan always believed in meeting his fans where they were: in the pages of a comic, at a convention, or in a quick on-screen cameo,” Chaz Rainey, lawyer and board member for Stan Lee Universe, said in a statement to Variety. “This partnership is a way of continuing that. Fans have always told us that when they read his comics, they hear the words in Stan’s voice, and now, thanks to ElevenLabs, we can make that a reality.”
This shit is so damn ghoulish it actually makes me sick. Every day I’m reminded that all that speculative dystopian fiction we’ve read, watched, and played over the years is finally happening, and the fact that Stan Lee is being puppeted out like a commodity by the people who were left in charge of his legacy after his passing in 2018 is like something out of Black Mirror. So long as major creatives are viewed as a product above all else, we’ll keep seeing corporations putting the dead on assembly lines for profit, and the most depraved, parasocial people you know will lap it up. Some of the celebrities getting wrapped up in this garbage are at least able to sign off on it themselves, but Lee’s been dead longer than this tech has been in the public consciousness. It’s vile, and yet the most tech-brained corpos on the planet keep trotting the dead out like they’re merchandise to be consumed long after they’ve been buried.
