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.<\/p>\n
Stan Lee has entered the chat.<\/p>\n
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<\/a> that interacts with attendees. Curious fans can ask questions of \u201cStan Lee\u201d and probe dozens of years\u2019 worth of comic book and comic book-related data that\u2019s been fed into the AI, which has been drawn from footage, conversations and even Stan Lee\u2019s Soapbox \u2014 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.<\/p>\n Chris DeMoulin, chief executive and general manager of L.A. Comic Con parent Comikaze Entertainment Inc., says the Stan Lee AI project took months of planning and years of being connected to the parties involved. <\/p>\n \u201cFor me, personally, one of the most thrilling things of my entire life was getting to work with Stan Lee when this was Stan Lee\u2019s Comic Con and Stan Lee\u2019s Comikaze Expo before that. What was such a joy was watching him interact with fans. Old fans and then people that were bringing their 8-year-old kid who had just read their first Spider-Man comic book,\u201d said DeMoulin, who has collected comics from an early age.<\/p>\n \u201cThis avatar, to us, is an entry point into the world of storytelling that he created. We wanted to create something which can be part of maintaining and expanding on that legacy so that Stan\u2019s role in creating a lot of this is acknowledged.\u201d<\/p>\n The hologram, at least the one on the show floor, is not really a hologram. With a box built by Proto Inc.<\/a>, the company that also launched an interactive mirror from \u201cThe Conjuring,\u201d and Hyperreal<\/a>, a company whose chief executive Remington Scott helped bring Gollum and Smeagol to life for Peter Jackson\u2019s \u201cThe Lord of the Rings\u201d movies and creates realistic avatars, it is an interactive Stan Lee image that processes questions and formulates responses.<\/p>\n \u201cHologram is a technology that\u2019s 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,\u201d says George Johnson, a member of the Hyperreal technical team. <\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s specifically Stan\u2019s words. Red carpet interviews, everything he wrote, like Stan\u2019s Soapbox, but with guardrails. Meaning, if you ask him sports questions or politics questions, he\u2019s not going to answer those. But the Stan Lee Universe is feeding us more and more stuff that we can add to the model.\u201d<\/p>\n David Nussbaum, Proto Inc. founder and chairman, knows that Stan Lee is only the first step for this technology.<\/p>\n \u201cAny Proto device can have any piece of content in it, and we also beam people in live. So if you\u2019re interviewing someone in Japan, you could beam there and appear like you are physically among them,\u201d Nussbaum said. \u201cThese are great for classrooms, museums, labs, retail.\u201d<\/p>\n Proto technology is also HIPAA-compliant, he said, meaning doctors and patients can use it to have \u201cin-person\u201d consultations without being in a room together. <\/p>\n As it learns, it can \u2014 as AI does \u2014 go a bit off script. While folks behind the scenes said they didn\u2019t want Stan Lee to be used as an advertising gimmick, its makers had asked it so many questions about Coca-Cola, it had changed its answer from a generic \u201cI don\u2019t deal with that kind of thing\u201d to a thoughtful answer where, at the end, Lee says, \u201cWho wouldn\u2019t want to be in business with the company that been quenching thirsts for a hundred years?\u201d<\/p>\n That was Stan \u2014 ever the showman. <\/p>\n