{"id":506902,"date":"2026-07-02T22:21:17","date_gmt":"2026-07-02T22:21:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/506902\/"},"modified":"2026-07-02T22:21:17","modified_gmt":"2026-07-02T22:21:17","slug":"weird-al-yankovic-wouldve-been-the-funniest-poster-boy-for-ai","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/506902\/","title":{"rendered":"Weird Al Yankovic Would’ve Been the Funniest ‘Poster Boy for AI’"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\u2019d 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\u2019d be a massive PR coup for the industry. After all, no one is calling \u201cPretty Fly for a Rabbi<\/a>\u201d slop.<\/p>\n

Of course, Weird Al was not going to do that. In a recent interview with Syracuse.com<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was offered this commercial before the tour. I\u2019m 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, \u2018Oh well, yeah, sure, I could do that,’\u201d he told the outlet. \u201cAnd then a week before we\u2019re supposed to shoot it, I find out, oh, this is, it\u2019s AI. And I thought, \u2018Oh no, I can\u2019t be the poster boy for AI, forget it.\u2019 So I felt bad about kind of pulling out at the last minute. But yeah, I\u2019m not, I\u2019m not down with that.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s use of copyrighted books to train Claude was found to be fair use<\/a>. But there is another landmark ruling, Thomson Reuters v. ROSS Intelligence, that found significant limits to the fair use argument for AI training<\/a>, so it\u2019s far from settled law.<\/p>\n

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\u2014but on top of that, he also makes it a habit to always reach out to artists<\/a> before publishing his take on their work. While Yankovic has run into pushback from artists a few times\u2014most notably when he accidentally pissed off Coolio<\/a> due to a series of miscommunications about \u201cAmish Paradise,\u201d his parody of \u201cGangsta\u2019s Paradise,\u201d but the two did squash that beef pretty quickly\u2014he has also completely abandoned parodies<\/a> when the original artist rejected his request for their approval.<\/p>\n

Yankovic also doesn\u2019t just create a cheap sound-alike track a la the Suno AIs of the world. He recreates the compositions from scratch<\/a>. Whenever possible, he also signs contracts with the original artists<\/a> so they get a writing credit on his parody track and royalties from his work.<\/p>\n

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<\/a>, \u201cI\u2019m not a fan of AI.\u201d So, no surprise they couldn\u2019t get his stamp of approval. It\u2019s just a shame for Al that he probably mistakenly sees his name everywhere now when people are talking about \u201cAI.\u201d That\u2019s gotta be weird.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Someone in the marketing offices for one of the artificial intelligence labs had the bright idea to land…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":506903,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[365,21911,363,364,7323,366,111,139,69,145,252737],"class_list":["post-506902","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artifical-intelligence","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-copyright","tag-generative-ai","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-technology","tag-weird-al"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/506902","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=506902"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/506902\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/506903"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=506902"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=506902"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=506902"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}