Taylor Swift falls prey to deepfake; AI-generated explicit images flood X
As Swifties reveal identity of one X user who shared images, White House calls incident “very alarming”, says it would do “what we can”
Pop icon Taylor Swift has become the latest celebrity to fall prey to artificial intelligence-generated sexually explicit images.
The deepfakes reportedly originated on a Telegram channel from where they flooded X (Twitter). On the latter, those pornographic fake pictures garnered millions of views and thousands of likes and reposts before being removed. Some images were reportedly found on Instagram and Reddit, too.
One user tracked
Though the originating point of the AI-generated deepfakes is still unknown, the identity of one X user, @Zvbear, who posted the images, was exposed by Swift’s fans, popularly called the Swifties. One of the fans soon came up with the address, phone number, and pictures of the house of 28-year-old Zubear Abdi, the real identity behind @Zvbear.
One of the posts with the deepfake images shored up more than 45 million views, 24,000 reposts, and hundreds of thousands of likes and bookmarks over 17 hours, reported The Verge.
White House responds
Even the White House responded to the incident, saying it was “very alarming”. White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told the media they would do “what we can to deal with this issue”, reported news agency Reuters.
With most social media platforms such as Meta and X largely depending on automated systems for content moderation, concerns have growing around the proliferation of offensive AI-generated deepfakes on these platforms without any check.
Deepfake in India
In India, several celebs, including Rashmika Mandanna, Alia Bhatt, Katrina Kaif, and Kajol, and Sachin Tendulkar’s daughter Sara Tendulkar have fallen prey to deepfake imagery. Last year, Rashmika Mandanna’s deepfake video went viral on social media, raising major concerns over the unregulated use of AI to generate an altered reality that’s hard to detect.
In another disturbing trend, AI is also being used to create “revenge porn”, that is, creating sexually explicit images of someone after a dispute/fight and circulating them online.