AI nudes of Taylor Swift go viral – what will she do about it?

A post on X with sexually explicit AI-generated images of Taylor Swift had over 45 million views, 24,000 reposts and hundreds of thousands of bookmarks before the user’s account was suspended. 404 media, a tech outlet, reports that the images originated in a Telegram group dedicated to abusive images of women using free text-to-image AI generators. The images were also posted to Celeb Jihad, a satirical website which shares “nude celebrity photos and videos”. Explicit AI-generated images are nothing new, and certainly not exclusive to Swift. But the global pop star’s influence and wealth (to take legal action if she chooses) may boost campaigns for more stringent policing of the creation and dissemination of AI-generated non-consensual content. A source close to Swift told the Daily Mail yesterday: “Whether or not legal action will be taken is being decided but there is one thing that is clear: these fake AI-generated images are abusive, offensive, exploitative… Legislation needs to be passed to prevent this and laws must be enacted”. X said it had a zero-tolerance policy toward the content. As of this morning, it took only a few minutes to find multiple accounts still sharing the images on the platform