Bringing, "Back," Stan Lee or Anyone Else With a Creepy AI Raises Many Concerns

Stan Lee is dead. Unlike comic-book characters, he died and is not coming back. Many articles painted his last years before his passing in 2018 as pretty dismal in terms of his quality of life and everyone around him, from family to employees, bleeding him dry--at times literally. Once you're dead I imagine you don't care what happens with your name or likeness (unless there is some way to check in from whatever afterlife might/might not exist), but your estate can protest and profit. Those who own your likeness might be okay with the idea of you dancing with a vacuum cleaner (to be fair, some of Fred Astaire's family was displeased) via doctoring old movie footage. They may even hear that AI can create the illusion that you're alive to think, talk, and tell jokes. ElevenLabs sold Stan Lee Universe, the joint venture between Genius Brands International and POW! Entertainment on this idea as now they can, "...add the late Marvel Comics writer’s voice and likeness to the ElevenLabs Iconic Marketplace, its collection of celebrity personality voices and likenesses that companies can license for commercial use."

This is the tech equivalent of taking a celebrity and attaching a bunch of strings to their corpse so you can make them dance around like a puppet. Stan Lee was a complicated and controversial figure, but I doubt anyone would argue against him being a master showman. That is, "Showman," as in, "Human," however. An AI does not truly have Stan's charisma, personality, or anything beyond people believing it was, "Trained," to mimic him and then be programmed to sell us a Marvel-branded juicer or some other junk. While Lee was alive, he did basically attach his name/likeness to anything, and everything from a cartoon about a stripper superhero to a reality show focused on being a real-life superhero. Lee was, in fact, alive and able to agree to these things, however. 

No. Nope. Absolutely Not.

An, "AI Stan Lee," can't ink a business agreement. It can't truly be okay with spouting off an endorsement for, "Marvel brand condoms, keep your genitals more secure than Iron Man's armor!" Even if the real Stan Lee would've been cool with this in some fashion, the whole thing is just ghoulish. What's next? We bring back AI versions of loved ones so we pretend they never really died? That's a whole mess of psychological trauma right there that I worry a lot of psychiatrists/psychologists will be dealing with soon. We're not just approaching Uncanny Valley anymore, we're living in it. Our virtual graverobbing will probably just be the tip of a scary iceberg.