The battles of human civilization are many and artificial intelligence has expanded the field of conflict. One of the most disturbing phenomena of our time is fake images generated by AI. American singer Taylor Swift is the latest victim of deceptive pornographic photographs and videos, called deepfakes, which use someone’s facial features on a foreign body. This week’s story has ingredients of a sordid political thriller and a spectacular popular insurrection movement in defense of the singer. The container in which everything has been cooked is, of course, social networks.
Artificial intelligence, in its audiovisual generation variant, has been the central instrument of a dark plot. It all started last Sunday, when the Kansas City Chiefs team of the NFL league beat the Baltimore Ravens and made it to the grand final of the Super Bowl, the great sporting event in the United States, which they will play on February 11 against the San Francisco 49ers. It turns out that Taylor Swift’s boyfriend, Travis Kelce, is one of the star players of the Kansas team and among the most conspiratorial supporters of Donald Trump, the theory has emerged that everything is rigged so that the Texan team wins the trophy and the singer , who does not hide his ideas contrary to the former president, takes to the field to give his support to the re-election of Joe Biden.
The list of followers of Trump and the MAGA movement (Make America Great Again) who have come out against Swift is enormous, as The New York Times reported. Mike Crispi, an announcer sympathetic to the Republican candidate, reported on X that the NFL league is rigged with the objective of spreading “Democratic propaganda.” The conspiracy theory is that the singer will be at the Super Bowl halftime show and that she will express her support for Biden with her boyfriend on the field. The singer has never hidden her defense of certain values, such as LGTBI rights, with explicit support for Democratic candidates. So among the most hyperventilating Republicans Swift is a target of attack.
On Fox News they suggested a couple of weeks ago that Taylor Swift is a military asset of the United States government for psychological warfare against Republican values. “About four years ago, the Pentagon’s psychological operations unit discussed making Taylor Swift an asset during a NATO meeting,” said a network anchor. The claim was even denied by the Pentagon. Fox is very obsessed with the singer’s possible electoral power.
The wave of verbal attacks on the networks soon became an offensive of deepfakes that took Swift’s face in pornographic content. X, Elon Musk’s network, was the first to spread them, although it ended up withdrawing them. What the authors of the attack on the artist did not count on is the large base of fans that she has and who organized themselves by massively uploading innocuous content to social networks labeled to appear in searches that related the singer to porn. Result: they covered the deepfakes. A full-fledged group rebellion.
The controversy has included the White House, whose Press Secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, has considered the attack with deepfakes against Swift “alarming” and has recalled that Biden has created a working group to confront online harassment and abuse. . The US government has launched a 24-hour national helpline for victims of “image-based sexual abuse.” The spokesperson considered that “there should be legislation, obviously, to address this issue,” but American legislators are slower than European legislators. The EU has an agreement for an AI regulatory law, the first in the world, which will act, among other things, against deepfakes, but which will not be applicable until 2026. In the meantime, solutions are needed. Let’s imagine the things that can happen until then.
