Celebrities that you don’t actually know probably shouldn’t be your role models. Still, we’d be lying if we said we weren’t a little inspired to hear about how comedic musician Alfred “Weird Al” Yankovic told the AI industry to “Eat It” after being approached to star in an ad.
In an interview with Syracuse.com spotted by AV Club, Yankovic dished on AI, saying he was “not a fan” of the tech, disliking it to the point that he’s resisted the siren song of taking a payout to shill for its powers.
As he tells it, he was offered “a nice pile of money” to star in a commercial before kickstarting his current tour. At first, the ad was pitched to him as for “business software that would increase productivity,” which sounded innocuous enough.
“And then a week before we’re supposed to shoot it, I find out, oh, this is, it’s AI,” he continued. “And I thought, ‘Oh no, I can’t be the poster boy for AI, forget it.”
How hard was that? Weird Al isn’t hurting for money, so of course he’s in a position to say no to a bunch of cash. But plenty of your favorite celebrities haven’t shown quite the same scruples. Everyman actor Matt Damon starred in a Super Bowl commercial for Crypto.com. Beloved goofball Larry David did one for FTX, the bankrupt and disgraced cryptocurrency exchange. And heartthrob Timothée Chalamet recently sent his fanbase into meltdown after doing a commercial for the prediction market Kalshi.
No, it won’t get Yankovic beatified. And maybe that we’re even talking about this a sobering testament to just how common “getting that bag” is these days. But hey: it will help “Weird Al” secure his place in the rarefied canon of beloved celebrities that haven’t completely sold out to Big Tech.
Even if the decision was motivated more out of image-consciousness than personal ethics, at least he cares about not associating his name and face with an industry that pretty much everyone who doesn’t work in it hates.
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