“Weird Al” Yankovic pulled out of his participation in a commercial for a business software company when he found out it is an artificial intelligence company.
In Syracuse, NY for his “Bigger and Weirder” tour, he told Geoff Herbert of Syracuse.com:
“I’m not a fan of 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.’ 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.”
Many artists have been fighting the unregulated, indiscriminate use of artificial intelligence, particularly in the creative arts.
More than 200 musical artists, including Billie Eilish, Elvis Costello, and Stevie Wonder have signed an open letter protesting the potential harm artificial intelligence poses to the arts. And visual artists Kelly McKernan, Karla Ortiz, and Sarah Andersen filed a class action lawsuit against Stability AI, Midjourney, and DeviantArt, claiming their copyrighted works were illegally used to train the companies’ AI models.