The deepfake-detecting group Reality Defender said it tracked a deluge of non-consensual pornographic material depicting Swift, particularly on X. Some images also made their way to Meta-owned Facebook and other social media platforms.
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Taylor Swift fans snap up concert tickets in Singapore for superstar’s Eras Tour
Taylor Swift fans snap up concert tickets in Singapore for superstar’s Eras Tour
“Unfortunately, they spread to millions and millions of users by the time that some of them were taken down,” said Mason Allen, Reality Defender’s head of growth.
The researchers found at least a couple dozen unique AI-generated images. The most widely shared were football-related, showing a painted or bloodied Swift that objectified her and in some cases inflicted violent harm on her deepfake persona.
Researchers have said the number of explicit deepfakes have grown in the past few years, as the technology used to produce such images has become more accessible and easier to use.
In 2019, a report released by the AI firm DeepTrace Labs showed these images were overwhelmingly weaponised against women. Most of the victims, it said, were Hollywood actors and South Korean K-pop singers.
Deepfake porn in AI race could ‘forever ruin’ women
Deepfake porn in AI race could ‘forever ruin’ women
Brittany Spanos, a senior writer at Rolling Stone who teaches a course on Taylor Swift at New York University, says Swift’s fans are quick to mobilise in support of their artist, especially those who take their fandom very seriously and in situations of wrongdoing.
“This could be a huge deal if she really does pursue it to court,” she said.
Spanos says the deep fake pornography issue aligns with others Taylor has had in the past, pointing to her 2017 lawsuit against a radio station DJ who allegedly groped; jurors awarded Swift US$1 in damages, a sum her lawyer, Douglas Baldridge, called “a single symbolic dollar, the value of which is immeasurable to all women in this situation” in the midst of the #MeToo movement.
(The US$1 lawsuit became a trend thereafter, like in Gwyneth Paltrow’s 2023 countersuit against a skier.)
When reached for comment on the fake images of Swift, X directed the Associated Press to a post from its safety account that said the company strictly prohibits the sharing of non-consensual nude images on its platform. The company has also sharply cut back its content-moderation teams since Elon Musk took over the platform in 2022.
“Our teams are actively removing all identified images and taking appropriate actions against the accounts responsible for posting them,” the company wrote in the X post early on Friday morning. “We’re closely monitoring the situation to ensure that any further violations are immediately addressed, and the content is removed.”
Meanwhile, Meta said in a statement that it strongly condemns “the content that has appeared across different internet services” and has worked to remove it.
“We continue to monitor our platforms for this violating content and will take appropriate action as needed,” the company said.
Hong Kong leader John Lee says big effort needed to draw star performers to city
Hong Kong leader John Lee says big effort needed to draw star performers to city
A representative for Swift did not immediately respond to a request for comment Friday.
Allen said the researchers are 90 per cent confident that the images were created by diffusion models, which are a type of generative artificial intelligence model that can produce new and photorealistic images from written prompts. The most widely known are Stable Diffusion, Midjourney and OpenAI’s DALL-E. Allen’s group did not try to determine the provenance.
Microsoft, which offers an image-generator based partly on DALL-E, said Friday it was in the process of investigating whether its tool was misused. Much like other commercial AI services, it said it does not allow “adult or non-consensual intimate content, and any repeated attempts to produce content that goes against our policies may result in loss of access to the service”.
Midjourney, OpenAI and Stable Diffusion-maker Stability AI did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
02:10
Taylor Swift impersonator fills void for Philippine ‘Swifties’ after no-show by US megastar
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Federal lawmakers who have introduced bills to put more restrictions or criminalise deepfake porn indicated the incident shows why the US needs to implement better protections.
“For years, women have been victims of non-consensual deepfakes, so what happened to Taylor Swift is more common than most people realise,” said US congresswoman Yvette D. Clarke, a Democrat from New York who has introduced legislation would require creators to digitally watermark deepfake content.
“Generative-AI is helping create better deepfakes at a fraction of the cost,” Clarke said.
US congressman Joe Morelle, another New York Democrat pushing a bill that would criminalise sharing deepfake porn online, said what happened to Swift was disturbing and has become more pervasive across the internet.
“The images may be fake, but their impacts are very real,” Morelle said in a statement. “Deepfakes are happening every day to women everywhere in our increasingly digital world, and it’s time to put a stop to them.”