Weird Al Turned Down Loads of Cash for an Incredibly Righteous Reason

There are plenty of risks when it comes to idolizing someone you don’t know, and chief among them is that they could easily let you down. Human beings are simple, fallible creatures, and even the best ones make mistakes or display poor judgment at times. It happens. So, you can’t let yourself get too tied up in who you think someone is, because they could reveal themselves to be an absolute monster. You could, however, avoid all of these pitfalls by idolizing Weird Al Yankovic.

I’ve waxed poetic often about Mr. Yankovic on this site. His music has given me so much over the years. It has helped lift me out of bad moods or depression. My kids are as obsessed as ever with his Captain Underpants theme, which can command them to dance and sing at a moment’s notice (a job many of his songs can accomplish). My life is absolutely better because Weird Al and his music are part of it (albeit in an outside-looking-in kinda way). Hell, the world is much better off with him in it.

Al recently did an interview with Syracuse.com to promote his current tour (which I highly recommend), and the subject of artificial intelligence came up. Let’s just say that Al passed the test with flying colors. “I’m not a fan of AI,” he told the outlet. “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 AI. And I thought, ‘Oh no, I can’t be the poster boy for AI, forget it.’ So I felt bad about pulling out at the last minute. But yeah, I’m not down with that.”

Should Al’s rejection of creatively void AI slop surprise me? No. Does its confirmation still fill me with abject glee? Yes, yes, a thousand times, yes! It’s also incredible that the story is pretty dang relatable. Money is, unfortunately, pretty great! When people offer you a lot of it, it can be easy to just say yes, even if you’ve already got some of that money. But, dagnabbit, Al stuck to his principles, and I love him deeply for it. Not just because it’s an admirable thing to do, but because if I had seen him as the shill for some AI company, I may have had to start going to therapy.

Instead, my love of Weird Al continues, not only uninterrupted, but hoisted above my head with even more pride than I had before. Creators like Weird Al are the antithesis to generative AI. He’s got creativity flowing out of his body in ways a computer could never dream of. The only connection he should have to that nonsense is that his name will kind of read like “Weird AI,” and that’s it.