Taylor Swift Calls Out AI-Generated Fake Endorsement, Sparks Voter Registration Surge

The AI Taylor Swift endorsement Trump shared was originally a pro-Biden Facebook meme

Taylor Swift endorsed Kamala Harris after Trump shared an AI-generated picture of her endorsing him. The AI image's creator spoke to NBC News. The artificial intelligence-generated image of Taylor Swift endorsing Donald Trump, which the singer said inspired her to endorse Kamala Harris for president this week, came from an unlikely place. The image, which caused controversy in August after being shared by the former president on Truth Social, originally circulated with text reading, "Taylor wants you to vote for Joe Biden," and was posted in a pro-Biden Facebook group with just 8,000 members in December 2023. That post was viewed by NBC News. A reverse-image search conducted by NBC News did not find any earlier incidences of the image being posted online. After the pro-Biden image featuring the AI-generated Swift was first posted on Facebook, it began to travel around the pro-Biden internet, particularly among Gen X and baby boomer supporters of the then-candidate. The Facebook group it was initially posted in is largely a place for Democrats to share memes and information in support of Biden and against Trump. The image also traveled to X and Instagram's messaging platform, Threads. S. E. Hinton, author of "The Outsiders," shared it on X in December. It was posted in a liberal subreddit the same month. "I am a Boomer for Biden," one X post of the image was captioned in January. The image's creator, a Democrat, asked NBC News to keep his identity private, wanting to avoid backlash. Inspired by Swift's 2020 endorsement of Biden, he said he used a generative AI platform to create an image from the text prompt "Taylor Swift as Uncle Sam," then used Photoshop to add text over it. On Aug. 17, around nine months after it was posted with the pro-Biden text, a pro-Trump X account with over 340,000 followers posted an edited version that read, "Taylor wants you to vote for Donald Trump." The X account did not respond to a request for comment about whether it edited the image itself or where it came from. The next day, Trump posted a screenshot of the X post on his Truth Social account with the caption, "I accept!" "I woke up one morning and I got a text message from somebody who sent me a picture of the altered version and said, 'Was this you?' I was like, 'Yeah that's an altered version of my original,'" the person who created the AI image of Swift endorsing Biden told NBC News in a phone interview. "I didn't think much of it until I sat down and started looking at the news. It started blowing up from there, with people saying Taylor might sue him and I thought, 'Holy crap, what did I do?'" On Tuesday, after the presidential debate between Trump and Harris, Swift posted an endorsement for Harris on Instagram. In the caption, she cited the AI-generated image Trump posted as one of the reasons why she wanted to make her stance known publicly. "Recently I was made aware that AI of 'me' falsely endorsing Donald Trump's presidential run was posted to his site. It really conjured up my fears around AI, and the dangers of spreading misinformation," Swift wrote. "It brought me to the conclusion that I need to be very transparent about my actual plans for this election as a voter. The simplest way to combat misinformation is with the truth." Swift included a link to the official voter registration website in the Instagram Story announcing her endorsement. In the 24 hours that followed, more than 400,000 people clicked the link from her account. "I agree with Taylor that AI, when used by bad actors, can be a danger to democracy," the AI image creator said. "If this leads to stronger regulation, I'm not only happy to comply, but I'll be happy that it makes the world a safer place." The AI image creator, an artist, said he initially started experimenting with AI to stay in step with technological advancement he perceived as a threat to his career. He said he realized it could be a useful way to create political satire. His public Facebook group is where he posts content in support of Democrats, starting with Biden's presidential campaign in 2020 and now in support of Harris' presidential campaign. "I didn't think it would go down this way," he said. "The intent of it was to boost support for Joe Biden because his communication was poor and his polls were low and Trump was a looming threat and I just couldn't stand idly by."

Taylor Swift Endorses Kamala Harris, Calling Out Donald Trump's AI Deepfake Post

Taylor Swift endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris for president on Tuesday, citing AI-generated deepfake images posted by Donald Trump that appeared to represent her support for the former president. Her message triggered a wave of interest in voter registration over the ensuing 24 hours. The popular singer-songwriter, who had previously been silent about her stance on the candidates, announced her endorsement after watching Tuesday night's debate between Harris and Trump, saying that the deepfakes Trump promoted "conjured up my fears around AI, and the dangers of spreading misinformation." "It brought me to the conclusion that I need to be very transparent about my actual plans for this election as a voter," Swift said. "The simplest way to combat misinformation is with the truth." Swift's Instagram post provided a link to Vote.gov, a resource on voting registration, and approximately 406,000 people clicked through to that site in the next 24 hours, The New York Times reported Thursday. Vote.gov directs users to voter registration sites in their own states, and it's unclear how many people actually registered. Still, the Times noted, Swift's link was responsible for more than half of the roughly 727,000 visitors to Vote.gov from Tuesday to Wednesday. Swift's endorsement of Harris, the Democratic nominee for president, comes just weeks after Trump posted on his Truth Social platform that he had accepted Swift's support. He also posted AI-generated deepfake images of Swift and her fans, known as Swifties, seemingly showing support for the Republican presidential nominee. The images, which Trump topped with the text "I accept," were originally posted on X, formerly known as Twitter, by a user who labeled them as satire. One of the images reposted on Trump's Truth Social account had the word "satire" in the image text. Conversely, Trump falsely accused the Harris campaign of using AI to fake a photo taken at a rally in August to show a greatly inflated crowd size. But numerous other videos and photos of the event showed a crowd similar in size to the one shown in the Harris campaign photo. Read more: Election Deepfakes Are Here and Better Than Ever The advancement of artificial intelligence, most notably with the rapid evolution of generative AI tools over the past two years, has made it easier for people to generate convincing deepfakes -- manipulated images, video or audio appearing to show people doing or saying things they didn't actually say or do. Experts worry these deepfakes could affect how or even if people vote ahead of the November presidential election. The best way to defend against deepfakes, experts say, is to be skeptical and to have an eye for detail. AI-generated deepfake videos, for instance, may have quirks in motion, lighting or phrasing. It's also important to evaluate whether the source is reputable and to do some fact-checking of your own. The Trump campaign didn't respond to a request for comment.

How Taylor Swift's AI callout could bring attention to misinformation

(The Hill) - Megastar Taylor Swift's endorsement of Vice President Harris shines a bright spotlight on artificial intelligence (AI) deepfakes, fears of which she said prompted her to take a public stance in the presidential race. Swift, 34, formally backed Harris moments after Tuesday night's debate, citing concerns around the rapidly developing AI technology and its power to deceive. She specifically noted how former President Trump shared several fake images of her and her fans last month, claiming he had her support. "It really conjured up my fears around AI, and the dangers of spreading misinformation. It brought me to the conclusion that I need to be very transparent about my actual plans for this election as a voter. The simplest way to combat misinformation is with the truth," she wrote in the endorsement. Experts say the admission by one of the globe's most known superstars underscores a wider concern voters and public figures are feeling when it comes to AI and its impact on the 2024 election. Trump's sharing of fake images of Swift isn't her first run-in with AI-generated content. Earlier this year, fake sexually explicit images of Swift circulated across the internet, renewing calls from federal lawmakers for social media companies to endorse their rules against AI-generated materials. Social platform X temporarily blocked searches of the singer at the time to combat the fake images' spread. "Her having experienced two of the most pervasive permutations of that [AI], you know, intimate image deep fakes and now election-related deepfakes just helps make the point that no one is immune," said Lisa Gilbert, co-president of Public Citizen, a progressive consumer rights watchdog nonprofit. Gilbert told The Hill the pop star is "correct in identifying the immensely damaging harms" that could come from the spread of AI misinformation, including in elections, and called for federal regulations to address the matter. The singer's massive following could be a unique opportunity to boost awareness about the spread of misinformation ahead of the November election, experts suggested. Swift's endorsement of Harris, and in turn, her stance on AI, was broadcast to her nearly 284 million followers on Instagram, putting her in at least the top 15 most-followed figures on the social media platform. "Taylor Swift does have a very large platform, and I do think that awareness can be powerful here, at least as a starting point," Virginia Tech digital literacy expert Julia Feerrar told The Hill. "If it's not really on your radar that generated content might be something that you're seeing, then just knowing that that's a possibility is huge and gives you a different reaction when you see something that's like, 'Hm, I don't know about that.' I think I would imagine that for a lot of people who saw her statement, they might think back to that the next time they see something." Feerrar noted the technology is still new for a lot of users, and Swift's endorsement serves as a large reminder to take precautions when seeing content that might already be aligned with users' biases. Swift's high placement of AI in her endorsement may also draw more attention to the issue. Its mention in the second of five paragraphs "lends weight and value to the ethics of political advertising online" and allows cyber misconduct to get "much-deserved attention," Laurel Cook, an associate professor of marketing and founder of the Social Technology and Research Lab at West Virginia University, told The Hill. "As the discussion grows, the potential benefit of incorrectly using digitally altered content wanes. In other words, it will soon no longer pay off to steal another person's image or likeness," Cook said. Civic Responsibility Project founder Ashley Spillane agreed there was purpose behind Swift's messaging. "I do think that ... she's very thoughtful, and she is the expert on how to communicate with her community. And so I think she really did put a great amount of care into that communication so that it would resonate with her community," said Spillane, who authored a recent Harvard study on the impact of celebrity endorsements. Swift's concerns join those of other Hollywood stars speaking out about what they feel is a lack of safeguards surrounding the rapidly developing technology. In June, actor Scarlett Johansson said she was "shocked" to learn OpenAI's Chat GPT rolled out its AI assistant that she claimed sounded "eerily similar" to her voice. Celebrities do have the advantage of mobilizing a platform to quickly debunk deepfake images or AI-generated content, unlike most of the public, some experts said. "Taylor Swift has a very large megaphone and so she is able to protect herself, in part, by communicating directly, as she did with her followers and others, publicly in a way that not everyone would be able to do," University of Pennsylvania law professor Jennifer Rothman said, pointing to a New Jersey teen victim of sexually explicit deepfakes who made headlines for her testimony before Congress. Various laws already exist on the unauthorized use of people's names, voices, and likenesses, along with laws aimed directly at fake intimate images, according to Rothman, who specializes in intellectual property law. The laws can be "very difficult" to navigate, however, for those who do not have access to the right resources, she explained. "There are federal laws that are being considered, that have been floated that will specifically target these sorts of digital replicas, and there are different approaches being considered," Rothman said. "I do think these uses are covered under current law, but it can be useful to have a federal law that addresses something for a variety of sort of legal reasons." She said it is still "early days" in terms of congressional legislation regarding AI-generated content and emphasized lawmakers need to ensure they do not enact measures that "make things worse." "Federal laws that make it more complicated or that suggest that under federal law, someone other than the person whose voice or likeness it is can own their voice or likeness is deeply troubling. And those are some of the ideas that have been floated. So, if those are the laws, we don't want them, but more targeted laws could be useful to make it easier and streamlined." While fears appear to be growing over AI's impact on elections, some experts do not think it is advanced enough yet to convince too many voters ahead of November. "The quality of some of this AI-generated content isn't as convincing as it could be, at least for the next couple of two months, at least," said Clara Langevin, an AI policy specialist with the Federation of American Scientists. "But we could get to the point, like in the next election cycle, where those things are indistinguishable."

How Taylor Swift's AI callout could bring attention to misinformation

Megastar Taylor Swift's endorsement of Vice President Harris shines a bright spotlight on artificial intelligence (AI) deepfakes, fears of which she said prompted her to take a public stance in the presidential race. Swift, 34, formally backed Harris moments after Tuesday night's debate, citing concerns around the rapidly developing AI technology and its power to deceive. She specifically noted how former President Trump shared several fake images of her and her fans last month, claiming he had her support. "It really conjured up my fears around AI, and the dangers of spreading misinformation. It brought me to the conclusion that I need to be very transparent about my actual plans for this election as a voter. The simplest way to combat misinformation is with the truth," she wrote in the endorsement. Experts say the admission by one of the globe's most known superstars underscores a wider concern voters and public figures are feeling when it comes to AI and its impact on the 2024 election. Trump's sharing of fake images of Swift isn't her first run-in with AI-generated content. Earlier this year, fake sexually explicit images of Swift circulated across the internet, renewing calls from federal lawmakers for social media companies to endorse their rules against AI-generated materials. Social platform X temporarily blocked searches of the singer at the time to combat the fake images' spread. "Her having experienced two of the most pervasive permutations of that [AI], you know, intimate image deep fakes and now election related deepfakes just helps make the point that no one is immune," said Lisa Gilbert, co-president of Public Citizen, a progressive consumer rights watchdog nonprofit. Gilbert told The Hill the pop star is "correct in identifying the immensely damaging harms" that could come from the spread of AI misinformation, including in elections, and called for federal regulations to address the matter. The singer's massive following could be a unique opportunity to boost awareness about the spread of misinformation ahead of the November election, experts suggested. Swift's endorsement of Harris, and in turn, her stance on AI, was broadcast to her nearly 284 million followers on Instagram, putting her in at least the top 15 most-followed figures on the social media platform. "Taylor Swift does have a very large platform, and I do think that awareness can be powerful here, at least as a starting point," Virginia Tech digital literacy expert Julia Feerrar told The Hill. "If it's not really on your radar that generated content might be something that you're seeing, then just knowing that that's a possibility is huge and gives you a different reaction when you see something that's like, 'Hm, I don't know about that.' I think I would imagine that for a lot of people who saw her statement, they might think back to that the next time they see something." Feerrar noted the technology is still new for a lot of users, and Swift's endorsement serves as a large reminder to take precautions when seeing content that might already be aligned with users' biases. Swift's high placement of AI in her endorsement may also draw more attention to the issue. Its mention in the second of five paragraphs "lends weight and value to the ethics of political advertising online" and allows cyber misconduct to get "much-deserved attention," Laurel Cook, an associate professor of marketing and founder of the Social Technology and Research Lab at West Virginia University, told The Hill. "As the discussion grows, the potential benefit of incorrectly using digitally altered content wanes. In other words, it will soon no longer pay off to steal another person's image or likeness," Cook said. Civic Responsibility Project founder Ashley Spillane agreed there was purpose behind Swift's messaging. "I do think that ... she's very thoughtful, and she is the expert on how to communicate with her community. And so I think she really did put a great amount of care into that communication so that it would resonate with her community," said Spillane, who authored a recent Harvard study on the impact of celebrity endorsements. Swift's concerns join those of other Hollywood stars speaking out about what they feel is a lack of safeguards surrounding the rapidly developing technology. In June, actor Scarlett Johansson said she was "shocked" to learn OpenAI's Chat GPT rolled out its AI assistant that she claimed sounded "eerily similar" to her voice. Celebrities do have the advantage of mobilizing a platform to quickly debunk deepfake images or AI-generated content, unlike most of the public, some experts said. "Taylor Swift has a very large megaphone and so she is able to protect herself, in part, by communicating directly, as she did with her followers and others, publicly in a way that not everyone would be able to do," University of Pennsylvania law professor Jennifer Rothman said, pointing to a New Jersey teen victim of sexually explicit deepfakes who made headlines for her testimony before Congress. Various laws already exist on the unauthorized use of people's names, voices, and likenesses, along with laws aimed directly at fake intimate images, according to Rothman, who specializes in intellectual property law. The laws can be "very difficult" to navigate, however, for those who do not have access to the right resources, she explained. "There are federal laws that are being considered, that have been floated that will specifically target these sorts of digital replicas, and there are different approaches being considered," Rothman said. "I do think these uses are covered under current law, but it can be useful to have a federal law that addresses something for a variety of sort of legal reasons." She said it is still "early days" in terms of congressional legislation regarding AI-generated content and emphasized lawmakers need to ensure they do not enact measures that "make things worse." "Federal laws that make it more complicated or that suggest that under federal law, someone other than the person whose voice or likeness it is can own their voice or likeness is deeply troubling. And those are some of the ideas that have been floated. So, if those are the laws, we don't want them, but more targeted laws could be useful to make it easier and streamlined." While fears appear to be growing over AI's impact on elections, some experts do not think it is advanced enough yet to convince too many voters ahead of November. "The quality of some of this AI-generated content isn't as convincing as it could be, at least for the next couple of two months, at least," said Clara Langevin, an AI policy specialist with the Federation of American Scientists. "But we could get to the point, like in the next election cycle, where those things are indistinguishable."

Taylor Swift's Endorsement Post Sends Rush of Fans to Voter-Registration Site

Taylor Swift's Instagram post endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris for president, and citing AI-generated deepfake images of Swift posted by Donald Trump, led about 406,000 people to click on a voter-registration information site, The New York Times reported on Thursday. Swift's post linked to Vote.gov, a site that directs users to their own state's voter-registration site, so it's unclear how many of the people who clicked the link registered in their state. The Times notes that Swift's link was responsible for more than half of the roughly 727,000 visitors the site received from Tuesday to Wednesday. The popular singer-songwriter, who had previously been silent about her stance on the candidates, announced her endorsement after Tuesday night's debate between Harris and Trump, saying that the deepfakes Trump promoted "conjured up my fears around AI, and the dangers of spreading misinformation." "It brought me to the conclusion that I need to be very transparent about my actual plans for this election as a voter," Swift said. "The simplest way to combat misinformation is with the truth." Swift's endorsement of the Democratic nominee for president comes just weeks after Trump posted on his Truth Social platform that he had accepted Swift's support. He also posted AI-generated deepfake images of Swift and her fans, known as Swifties, seemingly showing support for the Republican presidential nominee. The images, which Trump topped with the text "I accept," were originally posted on X, formerly known as Twitter, by a user who labeled them as satire. One of the images reposted on Trump's Truth Social account had the word "satire" in the image text. Conversely, Trump falsely accused the Harris campaign of using AI to fake a photo taken at a rally in August to show a greatly inflated crowd size. But numerous other videos and photos of the event showed a crowd similar in size to the one shown in the Harris campaign photo. Read more: Election Deepfakes Are Here and Better Than Ever The advancement of artificial intelligence, most notably with the rapid evolution of generative AI tools over the past two years, has made it easier for people to generate convincing deepfakes -- manipulated images, video or audio appearing to show people doing or saying things they didn't actually say or do. Experts worry these deepfakes could affect how or even if people vote ahead of the November presidential election. The best way to defend against deepfakes, experts say, is to be skeptical and to have an eye for detail. AI-generated deepfake videos, for instance, may have quirks in motion, lighting or phrasing. It's also important to evaluate whether the source is reputable and to do some fact-checking of your own. The Trump campaign didn't respond to a request for comment.

Opinion | What Taylor Swift just taught JD Vance and Donald Trump

The mega star "fearlessly" endorsed Kamala Harris, subtweeted Vance and indicted AI in an Instagram post. Taylor Swift's endorsement of Kamala Harris this week should teach hard truths to two men: JD Vance should never have spoken ill of "childless cat ladies." And Donald Trump should never have messed around with artificial intelligence. After the presidential debate Tuesday night, Swift posted a photo of herself that amounted to a subtweet of Vance -- looking into the camera head on, holding her fluffy, blue-eyed cat, a ragdoll named Benjamin Button. The caption was a letter to her fans, explaining why she plans to vote for Harris, citing LGBTQ+ rights, in vitro fertilization, abortion and, incongruously, deepfakes. The unexpected addition to the list of progressive policy priorities was a response to images that Trump, perhaps jokingly, posted to Truth Social late last month. "Swifties for Trump," read the signs in one photo. "Taylor wants YOU to vote for Donald Trump," says the text on another that features a robotically generated Swift posing Uncle Sam-style. Swift, however, does not even want to vote for Donald Trump herself, and she set the record straight. "Recently I was made aware that AI of 'me' falsely endorsing Donald Trump's presidential run was posted to his site," Swift wrote Tuesday. "The simplest way to combat misinformation is with the truth." Follow Molly Roberts Follow That Swift reacted poorly shouldn't have come as a surprise to the former president. (Trump didn't apologize, but he did admit the "photos" were fabricated by somebody else.) The pop star's desire to protect her image, her intellectual property and her image as her intellectual property is lesson 101 in Swiftology. Still, as much as this episode is what it says about Swift, it says even more about generative artificial intelligence. We worry about robots automating jobs out of existence, or hallucinating wrong answers to high-stakes questions, or producing false news stories on command -- and we're right to. But perhaps the most troubling threat the technology poses is to who we are. The idea that we might lose agency over our faces, our feelings and the fruits of our creativity is just as personal for any of us as it is for Swift. The AI imbroglio might not alone have prompted Swift to tip her hat to Harris: She endorsed Joe Biden last time around, also on the night of a debate, bringing extra attention to her even as she brought more to politics. The brouhaha over her friendship with Brittany Mahomes, who "liked" (and then later "unliked") a pro-MAGA Instagram post, might have moved up the timing, too. Still, given her record on protecting her likeness, it's improbable that stealing the image of the most famous woman on the planet for personal gain would do nothing to sway her toward issuing a political statement in line with her past endorsements. Swift has the means to fight back and the inclination. She is notoriously litigious. She countersued a radio host, who sued her for defamation, for sexual assault and battery. She threatened legal action against a college student whose tracking of her private jet got her in trouble with environmental activists angry about carbon dioxide emissions. And those aren't even her greatest hits. Her infamous feud with Kanye West reached its zenith when he included her as a nude wax figure in bed with other celebrities in his "Famous" music video. She described that incident as "revenge porn." This was a stretch -- but in a recent run-in with generative AI that predated the "Taylor wants YOU" non-endorsement, her description was closer to the mark. This year, deepfake pornography of the star swirled throughout the internet. Swift cares as intensely as perhaps anyone about her literal image and her image as an idea: the world's perception of who she is as an artist and a person. Generative AI, the best copycat we've ever seen, tried to steal both from her -- by painting her as a Trump supporter, and by just plain painting her. The rise of this technology presents less of a financial risk, but as much a personal danger to the rest of us. Our own images and our very selves are at more risk than ever. At its most frightening, generative AI allows malicious actors to manipulate our faces and voices to tell damaging lies about us. Yet even these systems' less menacing ability to hoover up pictures, words and the ideas they convey means they can mimic us and co-opt the creativity that makes us human. That's the bad news. The good news is, when misinformation involves someone, or something, pretending to be us, not only do we feel compelled to counter it, but we're also in a prime position to prove we're right. All we have to do is say basically what Swift said with her endorsement: That's not me. Getting the world to listen may be easier when you're a pop star. Yet her words should set an example to everyone else who feels their livelihoods or their selves are threatened by AI to -- as the singer-songwriter herself would put it -- speak now.