Taylor Swift deepfakes on X falsely depict her engaging in election denialism — and have been viewed millions of times

L4sBot@lemmy.worldmod to Technology@lemmy.world – 310 points – Taylor Swift deepfakes on X falsely depict her supporting Trump
nbcnews.com

Taylor Swift deepfakes on X falsely depict her engaging in election denialism — and have been viewed millions of times::Taylor Swift is being targeted again by deepfakes, with supporters of Donald Trump posting manipulated media falsely showing her supporting Trump.

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We need to make deepfakes of Trump talking about election fraud being a scam and how the american populous, especially urban and rural republicans, are fucken dumb. Just fill this bitch with trump deep fakes.

That would just make his supporters hornier. Deepfake him encouraging universal healthcare, human rights, immigration, peacekeeping instead of forever war, proportional taxation of the rich, reinstatement of roe vs wade. You know, the minimum standards for being a decent human being

Deepfake him to say "Only the uneducated are stupid enough to vote for me." And things of that nature.

…in a speech to supporters, [45] touted how many different demographic groups he won in Nevada, declaring that "We won the evangelicals. We won with young. We won with old. We won with highly educated. We won with poorly educated," before exclaiming "I love the poorly educated!"

There might be real videos of that...

For what it's worth, I doubt these videos were "viewed" millions of times. X tracks a 1-second automatic playback as a view, such as when someone slowly scrolls past on their feed. Every other service typically counts that as an impression.

Last I heard Zuckbook was just a lil better:

BlueSky in 2028:

Clearly, 300ms is enough to show intent to watch

sweats profusely looking at engagement numbers dropping as this threshold is increased

At what point does the media realize Twitter is basically 4chan now and doesn't need to be taken seriously anymore?

Can lazy ‘journalists’ publish five paragraphs that say little but have eleventy advertisements in the article? Do people click through, read said nothing, and get them money from advertisers?

Then the answer is “never”

If she would only apply as much legal pressure on X as she does on that one student blogger tracking her CO2 footprint.

I'm amazed her team of lawyers haven't filed a lawsuit yet. Just collecting evidence for now, I suppose. But it's starting to pile up quickly.

Can someone explain to me why we cannot wrap these deep fakes into existing identity theft law? Or at least impersonating a public official /government employee when it comes to politicians.

Because it has nothing to do with identity theft? The actors are not attempting to pass by another person for fraudulent purposes. Supporting Trump is not exactly illegal, I guess. I'm sure there are laws that align better with this scenario.

Cats out of the bag. We need to get used to it because it's only getting worse.

She should just wear a Biden T-shirt at the Superbowl & watch all the fundies clutch their pearls

The first Swift deepfakes I heard (currently the only ones) are the mathematical proofs (like this one on YouTube).

Hopefully, enough Swifties encounter them and are able to learn not just some sweet math, but that we have tech good enough to render anyone saying anything. Also that Deepfake Taylor has pretty solid math chops.

Then we get back to square one, where the authority or celebrity of a person is not enough to take their position as truth, but we also have to consider the merits of what argument they make.

For now, though, the Taylor Swift math proofs might serve to defuse Taylor Swift PSAs that might lead people astray.

ETA: Einstein adds a PSA to the end of this proof advising that yeah, we can't rely on who is saying something as informing its veracity. (Fixed!)

Here is an alternative Piped link(s):

this one

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Deepfakes are real media that is manipulated, often with the help of artificial intelligence, that tends to target celebrities and high-profile women in particular.

A representative for X wrote “The team was made aware of this AI-generated video and we took action on almost 100 posts on February 4, 2024, under our Synthetic and Manipulated Media policy.

The X account that the manipulated media appeared to originate from has also posted numerous other deepfakes on X, some also involving Swift.

A post on Monday contained an edited video of Swift’s album of the year acceptance speech at the Grammys, which appeared to use voice-cloning technology to make it sound as though she was saying “Trump won,” “F--- Joe Biden” and “Trump 2024 bit----, let’s go.” That post has over 750,000 views, according to X’s metrics, and it did not contain a manipulated media label or a community note indicating it is fake until after NBC News reached out to X for comment on Wednesday.

A search for “Taylor Swift Trump” on Instagram surfaced one post containing the video and no content labels or indications that it was fake.

The social media platforms that NBC News found hosting the fake Swift videos without content warnings have all struggled to moderate disinformation — AI-generated and otherwise.

The original article contains 868 words, the summary contains 214 words. Saved 75%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

It's insane how much I've heard about her recently. At this point I need to check out the fuck videos just so I feel all this talk has been worth it.