It’s OK to Let Go of Our Favorite Creators

Jun 02, 2026 6 min read

It’s OK to Let Go of Our Favorite Creators

AI can mimic a departed creative visionary, but it can’t bring back their vision.

Artificial intelligence has become the hot topic of 2026. Not the cool kind of Hot Topic where you can buy dayglo posters and black lipstick, but rather the stressful kind of hot topic that sets everyone’s teeth on edge and launches endless internet arguments.

And really, how could it not be at the front of everyone’s minds, when headlines are dominated daily by things like the way that A.I. center construction has resulted in component crises that sent game system prices skyrocketing, reversing the long-standing historical tradition of trending downward over time by spiking the price of hardware upward by 20–50% over the past few months? When Amnesty International declared the invasive, destructive nature of A.I. makes it incompatible with basic human rights? Geez, Amnesty International, tell us how you really feel.

And all of this for... what, precisely? Apparently, so that deceased celebrities can collect a paycheck in digital form. Or their estates can, anyway. Last week, the families of both Stan Lee and Ozzy Osborne announced that they’ve granted AI mills the rights to produce and publish virtual avatars of the men.

There are also Dragon Quest co-creator Yuji Horii’s vague allusions to keeping alive the spirit of long-time collaborators Akira Toriyama and Koichi Sugiyama for the upcoming Dragon Quest XII. Toriyama is said to have completed his illustration work for XII before his passing, but Horii’s recent slate of enthusiastic remarks about building games through generative and predictive content suggests the franchise’s leadership will look to A.I.-based solutions to keep the series style consistent despite the loss of those key contributors.

Jared Harris as Hari Seldon in Foundation.

© Apple

The concept of keeping people “alive” through artificially intelligent digital avatars has been an element of science fiction since at least the early 1950s. That’s when Isaac Asimov published his Foundation novels, in which far-future human society is guided through the chaos of a collapsing order by the interactive digital recording of psychohistory visionary Hari Seldon. But that’s sci-fi. Is it actually going to work like that in real life? Seldon hoped to prevent the collapse of human civilization, and his digital persona served as a guide (and not an infallible one) to keep progress from skidding to a halt amidst civil war and barbarism. With all respect to Ozzy Osborne, who created some great music through the years, his A.I.-powered likeness alone won’t prevent society from collapsing into barbarism.

In a way, the idea of using A.I. to “preserve” these creators seems totally contradictory to their legacies. Consider Lee, who helped build the foundations of modern comic books by looking at existing superhero tropes and approaching them from a radically new direction. The Avengers were a lot like DC’s Legion of Super-Heroes, except that they didn’t really like each other, and half of them didn’t even want to be part of the team. Spider-man had superhuman powers, but outside of his costume he was a put-upon nerd who narrowly avoided a villainous turn because of his profound guilt over causing a loved one’s death. The Fantastic Four were a family in the truest sense of the word, but the individual members squabbled with one another and struggled with their individual aspirations, needs, and desires. All revolutionary stuff for a funnybook!

Interestingly, Lee established the “Marvel Method” of comics, which almost resembles working with an A.I. prompt, if you squint hard enough. With Lee’s Marvel Method, he (or another writer) would outline a story and hand it to that issue’s artist, who would then come back with 20 pages of illustrated sequential narrative based on those beats but wholly presented according to the artists’ own storytelling instincts: the pacing of events, the panel breakdown, the expressions and movements of characters, the flow of action. The writer would then step back in and script dialogue to accompany the emotions and events that the illustrator defined, using words to flesh out the visuals and steer errant plot threads back toward their original vision—or even improvising a new story, if the panel layouts sparked that kind of inspiration.

Reed and the boys navigate the Negative Zone—and an innovative mixed-media pop art collage—in Jack Kirby’s visionary run on Fantastic Four.

The difference between Lee’s Marvel Method and telling an A.I. prompt to lay out a comic, of course, was that Lee collaborated with some of the greatest narrative artists ever to live. An A.I. might be able to churn out illustrations to resemble the work of Jack Kirby or Steve Ditko, but A.I. wouldn’t have been able to spin up the bizarre, never-before-seen cosmic visions of Kirby’s pop-art Fantastic Four adventures or the peevish undercurrent of social disaffection that ran through Ditko’s Spider-man pages. A.I. can reproduce a simulation of Kirby’s weighty line work and brick-like character designs, but it can’t understand why his characters occupy space with such weight and mass, and it couldn’t intuit when the mood of a story calls for a switch between realism and the surreal.

And while A.I. could effortlessly conjure up art in the style of Akira Toriyama (an artist who worked in a clear, consistent, crisp style), it could never create something as pioneering as the humble Dragon Quest slime. As the story famously goes, Horii sent Toriyama some crude sketches of basic blob-like slime monsters in the style of Wizardry’s amorphous monsters. Rather than simply refine that into a shapeless mass that could work at 8-bit resolution, Toriyama faxed back his unprecedented “grinning onion” design—a fresh take on an RPG standard unlike any other. Even Osborne’s work can only be imitated; A.I. might be able to gin up more music in the style of “Paranoid” or “No More Tears”, but it can’t actually undertake the same creative and experiential 21-year journey that led Osborne from one song to the other. So what’s the appeal in keeping their ghosts alive on our TV and computer screens?

Isn’t it weird how the fictional characters who keep themselves “alive” through A.I. are usually up to no good, like Robert House here from Fallout?

Still, there are always exceptions. While all of the above was happening, Hideo Kojima also announced plans to dabble in AI. And you know what? We’ll allow it. Kojima has always held a great fascination for technology, and he also has a remarkable knack for pinpointing its potential dangers. This is the man who brought us both Metal Gear Solid 2’s cautionary tale of digital media and the internet and also Death Stranding’s spot-on predictive metaphor for the isolating effects of the COVID pandemic. Can he nail it a third time? Do we even want to see yet another of Kojima’s dystopian worlds brought to life?!

So, yeah, let the man cook. The rest of you, though... please, reconsider. We cherish our memories of those lost creators, but they’re just that: memories. Plus, we’d like to be able to afford an OLED Steam Deck within our lifetime.