Lionel Messi
Footballer
Football’s GOAT says he doesn’t use ChatGPT and never got the hang of AI — yet he trained a licensed deepfake avatar for Lay’s in 2021 and became OpenAI’s first global partner as the face of ChatGPT’s 2026 World Cup campaign.
Why this score
How the formula works →- +3.1proCampaigns for AI adoption
- +2.4proHas published AI-made work
- +2.4proLicenses their data for AI training
- +0.4pro1 pro-AI statement (measured)
Weights, statement counts, and the formula’s smoothing are already baked in — the points add up to the score: Strongly Pro-AI · 8.3/10
In his words
I’ve always loved seeing how people experience football differently in each country. I turned to ChatGPT to imagine myself cheering in a new way, and I started with Argentina’s colours, of course. This season, I think many fans will discover new ways to follow the matches, better understand what happens on the field, and show their support with AI.
No, I don’t know, I never got the hang of it. … Antonela is on it all day, asking it everything.
Biography
Lionel Messi (born 1987) is the most decorated footballer in history — eight Ballon d’Or awards, a 2022 World Cup title with Argentina, and a late-career act at Inter Miami that reshaped American soccer. Famously reserved off the pitch, he has nonetheless ended up on every side of the AI story: licensed avatar, scam-deepfake victim, and finally the global face of ChatGPT.
The consented clone — and the criminal ones
Messi was an early, willing subject of synthetic media. For Lay’s 2021 “Messi Messages” campaign he spent five minutes in a green-screen studio recording footage that trained Synthesia’s deep-learning model, producing a lip-synced AI avatar that let fans send personalized video greetings from Messi in eight languages — a stunt novel enough to win a Cannes Lion. The unauthorized clones came later: in 2024, deepfakes spliced from a real interview he gave the Argentine streamer Olga circulated as Instagram ads, one pushing a fake earnings app called Wildcat Dive and another promoting a pyramid-scheme trading platform, prompting alerts from cybersecurity firm ESET.
Face of ChatGPT
In January 2026 Messi told the Argentine show Luzu TV that he uses neither ChatGPT nor AI, explaining simply that he “never got the hang of it” — while volunteering that his wife “Antonela is on it all day, asking it everything,” mostly about food. Five months later, on the opening day of the 2026 World Cup, Sam Altman’s OpenAI announced Messi as the first public figure it has ever signed to a global partnership, fronting a campaign that had fans generate more than 17 million World Cup prompts in a week — including the viral #MessiMode image style he demonstrated himself.
Quote sources
- Luzu TV, “La charla del año”, 2026 (translated from Spanish)(youtube.com)
- Statement for the OpenAI partnership, via Marketing-Interactive, 2026(marketing-interactive.com)
Sources & further reading
- Marketing Dive: Lay’s sends fans personalized messages from Messi using AI (2021)
- Luzu TV: “La charla del año” — the full Messi interview (January 2026)
- Marketing-Interactive: Did OpenAI just make Messi the GOAT of prompting? (2026)
- ESET WeLiveSecurity: alerta por deepfake de Messi promoviendo una app fraudulenta (2024)
Canonical record: https://battlelines.ai/topic/lionel-messi
