Someone in the marketing offices for one of the artificial intelligence labs had the bright idea to land Weird Al Yankovic as the face of the emerging technology. Frankly, it’d be a coup for the industry to align itself with Alfred Matthew Yankovic, a consummate artist who has made a career making significant alterations to the works of others. If people viewed AI-generated knockoffs in the same way they view Weird Al parodies, it’d be a massive PR coup for the industry. After all, no one is calling “Pretty Fly for a Rabbi” slop.
Of course, Weird Al was not going to do that. In a recent interview with Syracuse.com, the beloved parody artist recounted how he got recruited to do an ad for a software company and ultimately turned it down when he realized that it was going to be pumping AI.
“I was offered this commercial before the tour. 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. And they offered me a nice pile of money. I said, ‘Oh well, yeah, sure, I could do that,'” he told the outlet. “And then a week before we’re supposed to shoot it, I find out, oh, this is, it’s 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, I’m not down with that.”
Yankovic, who is 66 years old and still on tour doing a stage show that requires him to undergo multiple costume changes between high-energy performances, was probably never going to go for the AI pitch. His whole career is pretty much the antithesis of the way that the AI labs have operated.
AI companies have grabbed copyrighted material and turned it into training data for their models despite dubious legality, and are effectively brute-forcing their way into a fair use argument, claiming the outputs of their models are transformative. That argument has unfortunately netted a major win in the courts, in which Anthropic’s use of copyrighted books to train Claude was found to be fair use. But there is another landmark ruling, Thomson Reuters v. ROSS Intelligence, that found significant limits to the fair use argument for AI training, so it’s far from settled law.
Weird Al, on the other hand, has famously avoided legal trouble over his work. His songs are almost certainly safe under the fair use doctrine that protects parodies—but on top of that, he also makes it a habit to always reach out to artists before publishing his take on their work. While Yankovic has run into pushback from artists a few times—most notably when he accidentally pissed off Coolio due to a series of miscommunications about “Amish Paradise,” his parody of “Gangsta’s Paradise,” but the two did squash that beef pretty quickly—he has also completely abandoned parodies when the original artist rejected his request for their approval.
Yankovic also doesn’t just create a cheap sound-alike track a la the Suno AIs of the world. He recreates the compositions from scratch. Whenever possible, he also signs contracts with the original artists so they get a writing credit on his parody track and royalties from his work.
So basically, everything that AI companies have been criticized for failing to do, Al has done his entire career. No wonder they wanted him. But as he told Syracuse.com, “I’m not a fan of AI.” So, no surprise they couldn’t get his stamp of approval. It’s just a shame for Al that he probably mistakenly sees his name everywhere now when people are talking about “AI.” That’s gotta be weird.
