Stan Lee ‘Returns’ Under AI Pact: ElevenLabs Licenses Marvel Legend’s Voice and Likeness
ElevenLabs has licensed the voice and likeness of Marvel legend Stan Lee, who passed away in 2018, allowing users to generate his likeness and use his voice for narration. This partnership aims to keep Lee's legacy alive by enabling fans to experience his work in new ways. The initiative reflects a growing trend of utilizing AI to bring back the likenesses of deceased celebrities for commercial use.
- ▪ElevenLabs has struck a deal with Stan Lee Universe to license the late Marvel creator's voice and likeness.
- ▪Users can generate Stan Lee's likeness in comic-inspired templates and use his voice to narrate books through the Eleven Reader app.
- ▪This partnership is part of a broader trend where estates of deceased celebrities are exploring AI licensing for their likenesses.
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| Original publisher | Variety |
| Canonical URL | https://variety.com/2026/biz/news/stan-lee-elevenlabs-licensed-voice-likeness-1236759225/ |
| Publication time | Wed, 27 May 2026 16:00:00 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-27T16:08:01.779Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-27T16:08:01.779Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | zWCRuAj_vB8j · 2 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
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| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
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Home Biz News May 27, 2026 9:00am PT Stan Lee ‘Returns’ Under AI Pact: ElevenLabs Licenses Marvel Legend’s Voice and Likeness The AI-generated version of the Marvel legend, who died in 2018, can read books and users can generate his likeness in comics-inspired visual templates By Corbin Bolies Plus Icon Corbin Bolies Latest Tribeca Festival Sets First Premiere of Fully AI-Generated Film, ‘Dreams of Violets’ 2 hours ago See All Getty Images Marvel Comics has long resurrected iconic characters for second acts. Now ElevenLabs is doing the same for Marvel’s most famous creator, Stan Lee — in a sense.
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