Variety ran a story last week, but I didn’t see it get much play on the comic news sites. You can read the full story here but let me provide a few excerpts:
Marvel Comics has long resurrected icon characters for second acts. Now, ElevenLabs is doing the same for Marvel’s most famous creator, Stan Lee — in a sense.
The AI audio company on Wednesday said it struck an expansive deal with Stan Lee Universe, the joint venture between Genius Brands International and POW! Entertainment, to add the late Marvel Comics writer’s voice and likeness to the ElevenLabs Iconic Marketplace, its collection of celebrity personality voices and likenesses companies can license for commercial use.
Sounds kind of creepy to me. But that might just be me. I remember when I first was exposed to this concept.
It seems like yesterday, in some ways, when I was in college reading American Flagg (edited by PopCultureSquad’s own Mike Gold). That was one of the comics* that I was share with my college roommates, and it sparked good discussions.
The premise was the that lead character, Ruben Flagg, lost his job as an actor because the entertainment corporation decided to just use a computer-generated likeness/hologram of him in films. We didn’t use the phrase back then, but creator Howard Chaykin was prescient: AI pushed the hero out of his career.
Is bringing a real person back as AI more creepy or less creepy? I don’t know. I have to ponder this one a bit more. Back in the 80s, when I was making a lot of radio commercials, we’d have the vocal talent record messages for our answering machines as they mimicked old movie stars. I didn’t have any ethical issues then. Maybe I should have..?
Here’s more from the Variety article:
In addition, starting Wednesday, users can generate the Spider-Man and Iron Man co-creator’s likeness within templates inspired by comic book panels through its visual generator — though the images and videos are restricted to non-commercial use — or use his voice to narrate any book through its Eleven Reader app. The voice was trained on professional recordings of Lee, according to ElevenLabs.
It is clear that certain investors believe in this idea. The amounts of money (or greed?) is staggering.
The addition of the Marvel legend comes during a year of continued momentum for ElevenLabs, which raised $500 million in a Series D funding round earlier this year at an $11 billion valuation — five months after the company, which launched in 2022, offered employees a $100 million tender offer at a $6.6 billion valuation.
The partnership also follows the launch of its first volume of “The Eleven Album,” a collection of original songs co-created with singers such as Liza Minelli and Art Garfunkel (and some AI-generated music artists) alongside an AI model to produce “studio-quality compositions.” It released its second volume last month.
This comes after those stories in May about university students (University of Arizona, University of Central Florida, Middle Tennessee State University and more) booing speakers who espoused about the benefits of AI at graduation ceremonies. I get it. It’s a rough job market out there. And the fear of taking AI pushing workers out is very real.
At the ITHACON comic show at the end of April, student workers were outraged at rumors that one artist was using AI to produce work he claimed was his own. The student fury was fast and fierce.
It will be interesting to see how pop culture fans embrace this idea of AI Stan. Maybe it would be different if it was an AI Kirby or AI Ditko. Or even an AI Artie Simek. Stay tuned, True Believers.
*Swamp Thing and Judge Dredd were two other big favorites of my non-comic fan roommates.
