This week, nonconsensual deepfake porn of Taylor Swift went popular on X. Before it was taken down, one post got more than 45 million views, 24,000 reposts, and hundreds of thousands of likes.
The pop star has one of the most devoted, online-only, and unimaginably large fan groups in the world. The Swifties are now ready to kill.
Mega-fandoms can do amazing things when they get together, like when K-pop fans bought hundreds of tickets to a Donald Trump gathering to try to lower the number of people who showed up. As the 2024 U.S. presidential election draws near, some experts have even talked about how powerful Swifties might be as a voting group.
It’s not election day yet, though, and Swift fans are more concerned with something more immediate: making it as hard as possible to find the musician’s nonconsensual deepfakes. Now, if you look for “taylor swift ai” or “taylor swift deepfake” on X, you’ll find thousands of posts from fans trying to hide the content that was made by AI. “PROTECT TAYLOR SWIFT” has been popular on X with more than 36,000 posts.
These efforts that are based on fandom can sometimes go too far. Some Swift fans are telling each other to “dox” the X users who spread the deepfakes, but others are worried that this could be a bad way to fight harassment, especially if the person being harassed has a popular name and the Swifties might be after the wrong person. There are so many Swift fans working for the cause that it’s natural that not all of them will be on the same side. Some are more in touch with the “Reputation” era than others.
This form of harassment has become so common since generative AI tools became easier to use that the FBI and law enforcement agencies from around the world put out a statement last year about the danger of sextortion. Deeptrace, a cybersecurity company, says that about 96% of deepfakes are sexual and almost always show women.
“Deepfake pornography is a problem that only affects and hurts women,” the study says. Teenage girls have been targeted by their friends with explicit, nonconsensual deepfakes at school, where the abuse has even made its way there. For some Taylor Swift fans, this isn’t just about having faith in the star. They know that these acts can happen to anyone, not just famous people, and that they need to fight to show that this kind of behaviour is unacceptable.
A TikTok user called LeAnn asked other users to defend Swift in a video. “She is taking the hit for us right now, all,” she said. “If you keep her safe, you’ll keep yourself and your daughters safe too.”
404 Media says the pictures came from a Telegram chat where people use generative AI to make graphic, nonconsensual pictures of women. The group tells its members to use Microsoft’s Designer to make AI deepfakes. This type of content is against Microsoft’s rules, but the AI can still make it, and users have found easy ways to get around basic safety tools.
Microsoft and X did not reply to a request for comment before the article came out.
Congress is making some progress on making nonconsensual deepfakes illegal. Deepfake revenge porn is illegal in Virginia, and Representative Yvette Clarke (D-NY) just brought up the DEEPFAKES Accountability Act again, after first proposing it in 2019. Some people say that the bill could at least set a legal standard to protect people from this kind of abuse, even though others say it will be hard to regulate the dark parts of the web. Swift’s fans also brought up the problems with Ticketmaster, which owns Live Nation and is a huge leisure business. Lina Khan, chair of the FTC, said last year in a memorable way that the terrible experience of buying tickets for Taylor Swift’s Eras tour “turned more gen Zers into anti-monopolists overnight than anything I could have done.”
This campaign of abuse is a good example of one of the problems with AI’s rapid rise: companies are making things too quickly to properly evaluate the risks of the products they’re selling. So, maybe fans of Taylor Swift will fight for smart rules on AI products that are being made quickly. But if it takes a campaign of harassment against a star for untested AI models to be looked at at all, that’s a whole different issue.
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