Last week, Taylor Swift was trending on X, formerly known as Twitter. So far, so usual for the pop singer who dominated her industry last year.
But this time, the celebrity wasn’t in the spotlight for her record-breaking Eras tour, rerecordings of previous albums or her relationship with football player Travis Kelce.
Swift fell victim to fake pornographic images doing the rounds on Twitter/X and other popular platforms.
One image of Swift shared on Twitter/X was viewed 47m times before the account was suspended, according to a New York Times report. That’s an astounding number. Twitter has since made ‘Taylor Swift’ unsearchable in an apparent bid to hide these images.
But this wasn’t your early 2000s fake images. Those were easy enough to spot with their obvious photoshopping, the results of a malicious person manually manipulating images themselves.
Recent years have changed everything. Heralded by the launch of Chat GPT late the previous year, 2023 saw an explosion of generative AI services. These can string together wholly convincing written work and, more importantly for this issue, have grown in leaps and bounds where visuals are concerned. The early AI-generated images could perhaps be spotted by the discerning eye, but every week seems to herald a new service, a new update, and more powerful ways to create photo-realistic images of people that aren’t based on any reality. There are standalone image generation tools like Midjourney and Dall-e, but image generation is also being incorporated into more and more popular services like Canva, Chat-GPT itself, and others.
While some are still limited and clearly cartoonish in their output, that’s changing. The technology overall has developed at such a frighteningly rapid pace that one of its pioneers, the so-called godfather of AI, Geoffrey Hinton, quit his job at Google’s AI division, partly to sound the alarm over what had been unleashed.
Indeed, “deep fakes”, as the tech is dubbed, are getting better and better.
The website that shared fake, illicit images of Swift has done so before – along with other celebrities. The images are both products of illegal hacks into private accounts and generating fake images.
But it is the latter that creates the most cause for concern. As generative AI’s abilities grow so quickly, it becomes increasingly impossible to tell apart real from fake – and when videos are added to the mix, the potential for danger increases. Think of the misinformation that spreads during political campaigning and how much easier it will be to turn parts of the electorate against a candidate with a video of them saying something inflammatory. It’s literally, like so much in our often dystopian reality, something straight out of a Black Mirror episode.
So what’s the solution? Better legislation, for a start. We may be making some headway there, thanks in part to Swift’s star power and American sweetheart image. If there’s one person that’s difficult to mess with, for better or worse, it’s Swift. After Kanye West infamously disrupted Swift’s speech accepting the MTV Video Music Award for Best Video in 2009, he faced intense backlash. Years later, when she publicly feuded with other celebrities – notably her ex Calvin Harris, fellow pop star Katy Perry and West’s then-wife Kim Kardashian – comments below her Instagram posts were flooded with snake emojis from her enemies’ fans.
As Wired reported in an interview with Instagram co-founder and then-CEO Kevin Systrom in 2017, what happened next was most interesting.
“Suddenly, the snakes started to vanish. Soon, Swift’s feed was back to the way she preferred it: filled with images of her and her beautiful friends in beautiful swimsuits, with commenters telling her how beautiful they all looked.
This was no accident. Over the previous weeks, Systrom and his team at Instagram had quietly built a filter that would automatically delete specific words and emojis from users’ feeds. Swift’s snakes became the first live test case. In September, Systrom announced the feature to the world. Users could click a button to “hide inappropriate comments,” which would block a list of words the company had selected, including racial slurs and words like whore. They could also add custom keywords or even custom emojis, like, say, snakes.”
Further fixes were created and deployed to make Instagram safer – for everyone, not just (slightly entitled) celebrities.
The same thing happened when fan mania over Swift’s Era’s tour crashed the sales platform Ticketmaster in 2023, uncovering general issues around the company’s poor customer service, accusations of monopolising the industry and extortionate prices. What was a pop celebrity story morphed into a legal one, with the U.S. Department of Justice initiating a federal probe and US President Joe Biden himself getting involved.
The examples continue. Swift has an obsessive fan base and pop culture victim aura that together seem to compel authorities and those in power to quickly right wrongs for her. Those who don’t have such power and could be ignored may then benefit from the precedents set. For example, thanks to her crusade against Apple Music’s streaming services in 2015, the company announced that it was reversing course and paying artists for streams accrued during the free three-month trial period of its services – benefiting up-and-coming artists dependent on such payments to make a living.
Coming back to the explicit images that spread in the past few days, one can already observe the Taylor Swift effect at work. Even with X/Twitter’s drastically reduced workforce under its new owner, Elon Musk, the platform took swift – pun intended – action to protect the singer.
The company blocked searches for “Taylor Swift. “This is a temporary action and done with an abundance of caution as we prioritize safety on this issue,” X head of business operations Joe Benarroch said in a statement this past weekend (via Variety).
Even White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre weighed in, calling on social media companies to do more. Swift herself is reportedly considering legal action.
It’s not ideal. We should live in a world where we’re all protected, regardless of our status. But with a threat as massive as AI being used by bad actors, we can use all the help we can get to protect individuals and democracy. And if Swift is that help, so be it.
Image accreditation: Taylor Swift on X/Twitter
Verashni is passionate about empowering citizens to hold those in power to account. She was previously editor-in-chief of the Mail & Guardian and HuffPost South Africa, and won the CNN African Journalism Award, among others.
