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Musician and comedian “Weird Al” Yankovic says he walked away from a lucrative commercial after discovering it would promote AI software, saying he didn’t want to become “the poster boy for AI.”
The revelation came during an interview with Syracuse.com ahead of a stop on his Bigger & Weirder tour in Syracuse, New York.
Yankovic said he originally believed the advertisement was simply for business productivity software before learning, shortly before filming, that it centered on artificial intelligence.
Weird Al says he refused AI commercial despite payday
Yankovic said he had already agreed to appear in the commercial before discovering the company’s product relied on AI.
“I’m not going to mention any names, but they told me it was for a business. It was business software that would increase productivity,” he told the publication
“I said, ‘Oh well, yeah, sure, I could do that.’ And then a week before we’re supposed to shoot it, I find out this is AI. And I thought, ‘Oh no, I can’t be the poster boy for AI, forget it.’ So I felt bad about kind of pulling out at the last minute. But yeah, I’m not down with that.”
Dexerto
Yankovic also revealed he had been offered “a nice pile of money” for the commercial, but decided to withdraw after learning more about the project.
Yankovic joins a growing list of entertainers who have publicly criticized the use of AI in creative industries.
Filmmaker Kane Parsons has previously described AI as “genuinely harmful,” while Emma Thompson has said the technology has caused “intense irritation” in her creative process.
Madonna also recently criticized AI in an interview with Vogue Italia, saying, “Algorithms and artificial intelligence are the opposite of taking risks, and to me that is the opposite of making art.”
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Yankovic’s comments also arrive just days after Amazon launched an AI-powered party game called Courtroom Chaos starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, where players argue absurd legal cases before a digital version of the actor that responds in real time.
