Deepfakes aren't just coming for Taylor Swift

+ Trump owes E. Jean Carroll $83.3 million for defamation 🎀

My angels!! Hi!! How are you? How was your weekend? I went to Wellington for the most mind-curing few days with my best friends which consisted of tears, karaoke, and a LOT of Love Island. Turns out the remedy to a lot of life’s tribulations is good old female friendship. Someone should write a book about that? Oh wait.

Also, a big hi to all our new Close Friends!! Obsessed with every single one of you, obv 🥺

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☆⋆｡𖦹°‧★ ON THE WEB ☆⋆｡𖦹°‧★

Deepfakes aren't just coming for Taylor Swift

Because we live in a fucked up reality, it was only a matter of time until a celebrity prominent enough to make global headlines got deepfaked, and unfortunately for Taylor Swift, she was that celebrity (I know she’s not the first, but it’s saying something when even my Dad knows about this story).

For anyone who’s never heard the term, a ‘deepfake’ is an extremely convincing fake video/photo/ piece of audio, made using a form of AI called ‘deep learning.’ It’s been used to make politicians seem like they’ve said things they never did, and to make normal people look like Tom Cruise, but largely, deepfakes are used in pornography.

Over the weekend sexually explicit AI-generated images of Taylor Swift started circulating on X (after originating in a Telegram group.) They were made using Microsoft Designer (their free generative AI tool), and as Jess Weatherbed reported at The Verge, they gained quite a lot of traction.

One of the most prominent examples on X attracted more than 45 million views, 24,000 reposts, and hundreds of thousands of likes and bookmarks before the verified user who shared the images had their account suspended for violating platform policy. The post was live on the platform for around 17 hours prior to its removal.

But as users began to discuss the viral post, the images began to spread and were reposted across other accounts. Many still remain up, and a deluge of new graphic fakes have since appeared. In some regions, the term “Taylor Swift AI” became featured as a trending topic, promoting the images to wider audiences.

45 million views later and X has temporarily blocked ALL searches for “Taylor Swift” (which doesn’t actually fix the problem, just buys them a bit more time really), but as Casey Newton puts it in Platformer, this has been a long time coming:

At its most basic level, this is a story about X, and not a particularly surprising one at that. When Elon Musk took over X, he dismantled its trust and safety teams and began enforcing its written policies — or not — depending on his whims.

Given those circumstances, it's only natural that the platform would be flooded with graphic AI-generated images. While it is rarely discussed in polite company, X is one of the biggest porn apps in the world, thanks to its longstanding policy allowing explicit photos and videos and Apple's willingness to turn a blind eye to a company that has long flouted its rules.

This has never just been about celebrities

Deepfakes are a problem for celebrities, yeah, but more broadly, they’re a problem for women. They’re such a problem for us that one report from Sensity AI found that 96% of deepfakes were sexually explicit, while 99% of them feature women.

As optimistic as I usually like to be about new technology, the rise and ease of making deepfakes (something I’ve been following for a few years now) feels pretty bleak. Just look at this:

On 4chan, groups of trolls are watching livestreams of municipal courtrooms and then creating non-consensual nude imagery of women who take the witness stand. This month, nonconsensual nude deepfakes were spotted at the top of Google and Bing search results. Deepfake creators are taking requests on Discord and selling them through their websites. And so far, only 10 states have addressed deepfakes through legislation; there is no federal law prohibiting them. (Those last three links come from NBC's Kat Tenbarge, who has been doing essential work on this beat.) - Platformer

Swift is reportedly considering legal action, and I hope she does. It shouldn’t take a celebrity of this magnitude being exploited to make lawmakers get a move on in finding out how to protect us all from things like this, but as we all know, sometimes it does.

Deeper reading (no pun intended)

• Microsoft’s Satya Nadella says the explicit Taylor Swift AI fakes are ‘alarming and terrible’ (The Verge)

• Call for action on deepfakes as fears grow among MPs over election threat (The Guardian)

• AI-Generated Taylor Swift Porn Went Viral on Twitter. Here's How It Got There (404 Media)

• Deepfake Technology Has Been Weaponised Against Women — & Taylor Swift Is The Latest Victim (Refinery 29)

• The Taylor Swift deepfakes are a warning (Platformer)

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So many of us have grown up having everything available and accessible to us all the time - which is AMAZING for so many reasons, but there is a cost to free things - even if you can’t see it.

In a world that feels more mystifying by the day, where journalists are constantly being laid off, and misinformation spreads faster than a leaked Harry Styles song, finding media that you trust, understand and actually want to read is so important.

I know you value what I do - so many of you email me saying how much you love the newsletter, thanking me for explaining topics you might not have heard of, and telling me how much it means to you that you’ve got a friend on the other side of this thing (🥺🥺🥺) If you believe in paying for the media (or the person???) you love, then please consider becoming a supporter.

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Trump owes E. Jean Carroll $83.3 million for defamation

Read this sentence with me, friends:

Former President Donald J. Trump was ordered by a Manhattan jury on Friday to pay $83.3 million to the writer E. Jean Carroll for defaming her in 2019 after she accused him of a decades-old rape, attacks he continued in social media posts, at news conferences and even in the midst of the trial itself. - The New York Times.

E. Jean Carroll didn’t just win her case against Trump - she was also awarded $83.3 million dollars. That’s $65 million in punitive damages (after it was found that that Mr. Trump had acted with malice) and another $18.3 million in compensatory damages for her suffering. It was reported that hearing the numbers being called out caused Trump's lawyers to “slump in their seats” which feels right.

“This is a great victory for every woman who stands up when she’s been knocked down and a huge defeat for every bully who has tried to keep a woman down.” - E. Jean Carroll

And, once she obtains the money (which could take years) she plans to do something worthwhile with it.

“I’m not going to waste a cent of this,” she said. “We’re going to do something good with it.”

More on this story here:

• Trump-Carroll Defamation Trial: Jury Orders Trump to Pay Carroll $83.3 Million for Defamation (The New York Times)

• E. Jean Carroll, my mother and the power of staying visible (NBC)

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▶︎ •၊၊||၊|။|||| CULTURE VULTURE ▶︎ •၊၊||၊|။||||

Just thinking about these cute photos of Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce:

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