Efforts to find Taylor Swift on X yield no results following the circulation of explicit AI images.
Attempts to locate Taylor Swift on X, previously referred to as Twitter, resulted in an error message on Saturday subsequent to the dissemination of pornographic AI-generated images featuring the singer across various social media platforms last week.
On X, the search function exclusively exhibits outcomes for Swift within its “Media” and “List” tabs. Nevertheless, Swift remains discoverable through various boolean operators. Employing “Taylor Swift” enclosed in quotation marks or “Taylor AND Swift” generates standard search outcomes across all tabs of X’s search function.
Notably, neither Instagram nor Reddit display the search function error message.
The fabricated images of Swift, depicting her in sexually suggestive and explicit poses, primarily circulated on X, garnering tens of millions of views before their removal from social platforms.
Similar to other major social media platforms, X prohibits the dissemination of “synthetic, manipulated, or out-of-context media that may deceive or confuse people and lead to harm.”
The proliferation of digitally altered pornographic images featuring celebrities is not a novel occurrence on the internet, having circulated online since the emergence of software such as Photoshop. However, the surge in mainstream artificial intelligence software has raised concerns owing to its capacity to generate convincingly authentic and detrimental images.
This incident emerges as the U.S. approaches a presidential election year, prompting apprehensions that misleading AI-generated images and videos could be leveraged in disinformation campaigns.
Moreover, it is not solely prominent public figures with extensive online presence who encounter such forms of harassment.
Presently, nine U.S. states have enacted laws against the creation or dissemination of this form of nonconsensual deepfake photography, which involves crafting synthetic images to replicate an individual’s likeness.
