The Four Color Media Monitor

Almost 7 years after Marvel's most famous writer/editor/publisher passed on, the Los Angeles Times reports the local comicon's developed an AI program with Stan Lee's image that's supposed to be able to answer any questions asked of it regarding entertainment:

Artificial intelligence and its invasiveness in our everyday lives might be endlessly discussed among academics, government officials and social media provocateurs, but Los Angeles Comic Con has injected a dose of gamma radiation and showmanship into that debate.

Stan Lee has entered the chat.

L.A. Comic Con is introducing its Stan Lee Experience, a 1,500-square-foot booth in Aisle 200 that features an AI-powered holographic image of the late comic book legend that interacts with attendees. Curious fans can ask questions of “Stan Lee” and probe dozens of years’ worth of comic book and comic book-related data that’s been fed into the AI, which has been drawn from footage, conversations and even Stan Lee’s Soapbox — where Lee would expand on happenings of the day or riff on comic book goings-on in the back pages of Marvel comics from 1967 through 1980.

[...] The hologram, at least the one on the show floor, is not really a hologram. With a box built by Proto Inc., the company that also launched an interactive mirror from “The Conjuring,” and Hyperreal, a company whose chief executive Remington Scott helped bring Gollum and Smeagol to life for Peter Jackson’s “The Lord of the Rings” movies and creates realistic avatars, it is an interactive Stan Lee image that processes questions and formulates responses.

“Hologram is a technology that’s different than this. This is more of an avatar presence, or a telepresence, if you will. Unlike ChatGPT, this is not a web crawler. This is a large language model which has got guardrails on it,” says George Johnson, a member of the Hyperreal technical team.

“It’s specifically Stan’s words. Red carpet interviews, everything he wrote, like Stan’s Soapbox, but with guardrails. Meaning, if you ask him sports questions or politics questions, he’s not going to answer those. But the Stan Lee Universe is feeding us more and more stuff that we can add to the model.”

Even if they're avoiding injection of divisive politics into the program, that doesn't make this a legitimate project in every way. Considering how Stan was exploited by almost every cynical profiteer possible in the last years of his life, and they're still doing it in some ways long after, that's why this is little more than another attempt to milk Lee's legacy dry in ways that don't help it long after he's gone. Mainly because:

The Stan Lee Experience costs $15 plus service fees with tickets available for purchase via the L.A. Comic Con website. The pop culture gathering runs through Sunday at the Los Angeles Convention Center.

Well, this is telling. We're supposed to pay for a conversation with an image that's based on Lee, but not the real thing? Sorry, but that's still exploiting his image for money, and little else. Whatever he thought of life, love and comicdom in his time that historians know about, it should be written about in history books, not injected so ridiculously into a machine that's not the real deal. And where were these folks when Lee's whole enterprise was being taken apart by awful successors like Joe Quesada and Bill Jemas for starters? I'm sorry, but this is no improvement.

Here's what Ars Technica has to say about the reactions, and the lack of free use for the program, which could be more costly than what the LA Times says:

Late last week, The Hollywood Reporter ran a story about an "AI Stan Lee hologram" that would be appearing at the LA Comic Con this weekend. Nearly seven years after the famous Marvel Comics creator’s death at the age of 95, fans will be able to pay $15 to $20 this weekend to chat with a life-sized, AI-powered avatar of Lee in an enclosed booth at the show.

The instant response from many fans and media outlets to the idea was not kind, to say the least. A writer for TheGamer called the very idea "demonic" and said we need to "kill it with fire before it’s too late." The AV Club urged its readers not to pay to see "the anguished digital ghost of a beloved comic book creator, repurposed as a trap for chumps!" Reactions on a popular Reddit thread ranged from calling it "incredibly disrespectful" and "in bad taste" to "ghoulish" and "so fucked up," with very little that was more receptive to the concept.

While some of the news sites cited aren't particularly appealing, the sentiment regarding Lee in itself is valid. Again, this is all stuff that should be reserved for history books and documentaries, not some superfluous technology that's just exploitation. And does the program actually avoid politics?

While a moderator at the convention will be on hand to repeat fan questions into a microphone (to avoid ambient crowd noise from the showfloor), DeMoulin said there won’t be any human filtering on what fans are allowed to ask the Lee avatar in the 15- to 20-minute group Q&A sessions. Instead, DeMoulin said the team has set up a system of "content governors" so that, for instance, "if you ask Stan what he thought of the last presidential election he's gonna say 'That's not what we're here to talk about. We're here to talk about the Marvel universe.'"

For topics that are Marvel-related, though, the AI avatar won’t shy away from controversy, DeMoulin said. If you ask the avatar about Jack Kirby, for instance, DeMoulin said it will address the "honest disagreements about characters or storylines, which are gonna happen in any creative enterprise," while also saying that "‘I have nothing but respect for him,’ which is I think largely what Stan would have said if he was asked that question."

[...] Throughout our talk, DeMoulin repeatedly stressed that their AI hologram wasn’t intended to serve as a replacement for the living version of Lee. "We want to make sure that people understand that we are not trying to bring Stan back from the dead," he said. "We're not trying to say that this is Stan, and we're not trying to put words in his mouth, and this avatar is not gonna start doing commercials to advertise other people's products."

But what if they do put words in his mouth? Of course, I do recall Stan was a product of his time who wouldn't criticize Marvel management under any circumstances, so I realize the program likely wouldn't offer any objective views of successive writers/artists/editors who since brought down Marvel to the bottom. (Though it's a real shame Lee wouldn't defend Frank Miller's Holy Terror GN years ago, and told the MSM just what they'd want to hear. That Miller's since capitulated doesn't change all that.) But, what if you asked the program if it believes a sex-positive viewpoint is better than a negative one? Would it all be set up to side with negativity? Would it even side with Joe Quesada on the issue of Mary Jane Watson and also Captain America? Seriously, it wouldn't be shocking if it were a biased program.

If there's any creator I found commenting on the LA comicon's project, it's Jim Zub:

This is not a celebration of the man or his work, it's souless and ghoulish in a way that's hard to comprehend. https://t.co/BPw3TVzzk2

— Jim Zub 🎲 (@JimZub) September 29, 2025

While I do think it's ill-advised to exploit Lee's image for something like this, the alleged refrain from politics notwithstanding, it could also be argued only so many Marvel stories since the early 2000s are soulless and ghoulish too. And Zub did little to improve upon that when he worked for them, because of course, he was working under the horrible mandates set up by Axel Alonso, who was EIC around the time Zub wrote Thunderbolts, and even under C.B. Cebulski, it wasn't much better. If Zub were assigned to Spider-Man, could we be surprised if he followed said mandates restricting use of Mary Jane Watson either?

All that aside, this whole issue of Lee being turned into an AI image that requires money to interact with is only perpetuates a very sad picture of how Lee was taken advantage of in the last years of his life by people who had no respect for him or his creations, and nobody should have to pay for something that could possibly turn up for use on home computers later anyway.

Labels: Avengers, bad editors, Captain America, conventions, good writers, history, marvel comics, msm propaganda, science, Spider-Man, technology, women of marvel