Stan Lee’s Voice Licensed to AI for Commercial Uses, Non-Stan Lee Stories

The company Stan Lee Universe has struck a deal with AI likeness generators ElevenLabs to license the comic icon’s voice and look for both commercial uses and a public domain audiobook club.

‘This won’t defile the dead at all,’ said someone who works at the death-defiling company. No, they had AI-Stan Lee make the announcement. “You know what they never tell you about legends?” machine Lee intones in a video shared by ElevenLabs. “They outlive the page.”

In addition to whatever purposes they might put his voice and likeness, the estate’s Stan Lee Universe is also supporting the aforementioned audiobook club, which will be fully public domain, be updated once a month, and begin with Treasure Island. Ah, the future, where you’ll be able to hear Stan Lee reading Moby Dick, or Stan Lee reading ads about mail-order collapsible mattresses, but nothing actually written by Stan Lee.

ElevenLabs has previously worked on some other projects you might have heard about, such as that odd AI-human collaboration that “featured” versions of Liza Minelli and Art Garfunkel, as well as the Jerry Garcia remonetization project that lent his voice to books and articles, plus Spotify’s crackdown on AI tracks, with ElevenLabs serving as the AI detectors.