“Weird Al” Yankovic pulls out of AI ad

“Weird Al” Yankovic isn’t down with AI. The musician, who is traveling across the United States for his Bigger & Weirder Tour, sat down with Syracuse.com for an interview on Monday. Talking to Geoff Herbert, Yankovic revealed that he’d pulled out of an ad for a business software company after learning of the ad’s connections to artificial intelligence. He alleged that, despite being offered a “nice pile of money,” he backed away from the partnership. Yankovic has not revealed the name of the software company he was scheduled to work with. “They told me it was…a business software that would increase productivity,” he told Herbert. “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.’”

Yankovic, whose human-generated tour runs through the fall, is no stranger to toying with copyrighted material. In fact, he built a career out of parodying existing art. But, even for the weirdest among us, Yankovic is too freaky. “I felt kind of bad pulling out at the last minute,” he explained to Herbert further. “But, yeah. I’m not down with that.” Apologies to the poor marketing intern who had that bright idea: when “Weird Al” dares to be stupid, he’s doing it all on his own. This probably means there won’t be any AI-generated content in the forthcoming “Weird Al” Broadway musical, something that can’t be said these days for Broadway as a whole.

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