AI audio company ElevenLabs has partnered with Stan Lee Universe to add the late Marvel Comics creator’s voice and likeness to its commercial licensing platform, as per US media reports.

The deal will see Stan Lee’s AI-generated voice and likeness added to the ElevenLabs Iconic Marketplace, which allows companies to license celebrity personalities for commercial use, Variety reported.

“You know what they never tell you about legends?” the AI-generated version of Stan Lee says in a video released by ElevenLabs. “They outlive the page.”

“With great power comes great responsibility,” Lee’s replicated voice says in the promotional video.

Users will also be able to generate Lee’s likeness through comic book-inspired visual templates for non-commercial use and use his voice to narrate books through the Eleven Reader app.

https://x.com/ElevenLabs/status/2059668042695516628

ElevenLabs said the voice model was trained using professional recordings of Lee.

“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.

“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,” he added.

The partnership comes amid growing experimentation by celebrities and estates over licensing likenesses and voices for AI-related content.

Other personalities reportedly available on ElevenLabs’ platform include Michael Caine, Judy Garland, Burt Reynolds, David Hasselhoff and Albert Einstein. It also noted that the estate of late actor Val Kilmer recently allowed an upcoming film to use AI-generated versions of his image and voice.

ElevenLabs will also launch a “Stan Lee Book Club of the Month” series on the Eleven Reader platform. The series will feature Lee’s AI-generated voice narrating a different public-domain book each month. June’s title is Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island.

The company is also introducing two comic book-themed music filters inspired by Lee to its AI music generator, ElevenCreative Music, titled Superhero Cinematic Swells and Retro Hero Fanfare.

Lee, who died in 2018 at the age of 95, had his name, voice and likeness licensed by Marvel in 2022 for use in films, television shows and Disney theme parks.