This week, images of Taylor Swift supporting GOP nominee Donald Trump for president started popping up on social media sites, including Trump’s own Truth Social platform.
The controversy surrounding the images isn’t in relation to Swift supporting Trump, but because the images were created with artificial intelligence. In other words, they weren’t really pictures of Swift expressing her support for the Republican candidate.
A day after the images began to appear online, Trump responded to them, saying he doesn’t know “anything about” them.
Grady Trimble, a correspondent for the FOX Business Network, asked Trump whether he was worried that Swift might sue him over the images. He responded:
“I don’t know anything about them, other than somebody else generated them. I didn’t generate them.”
Trump explained that someone told him “look at this.” The photos, he said, were “all made up by other people.” He continued:
“AI is always very dangerous in that way.”
There were many images that were posted online, one which shows Swift dressed in an Uncle Sam outfit saying:
“Taylor wants you to vote for Donald Trump.”
There’s another image that was posted first to the social media site X with a satire label on it. It shows many different women wearing shirts that say “Swifties for Trump,” with the post saying:
“Swifties turning to Trump after ISIS foiled Taylor Swift concert.”
That post comes after Swift actually had to cancel some of her “Eras Tour” concerts in Vienna when it was discovered that ISIS was planning a terror attack at one of them.
She released a statement on Instagram this week about the situation, writing:
“Having our Vienna shows canceled was devastating. The reason for the cancellations filled me with a new sense of fear, and a tremendous amount of guilt because so many people had planned on coming to those shows.”
She then thanked authorities, writing:
“Thanks to them, we were grieving concerts and not lives.”
The people who created the AI-generated images of Swift were piggybacking on that big news, hoping to use it to sway more people to vote for Trump come November’s election.
Swift is certainly a huge public figure with a worldwide reach, but it’s not certain how much pull she’d have in political circles. In 2020, though, she did write an online post about Vote.org, which resulted in 35,000 new people registering to vote.
As such, many people are speculating about whether Swift will endorse any candidate for the upcoming presidential election, though it’s also widely speculated that if she did endorse someone, it would be Trump’s opponent, Democrat Kamala Harris.
This isn’t the first controversy involving Trump and AI images. The former president has shared AI-generated images of Harris speaking at a communist event, and called her “Comrade Kamala” in the process.
Many people have worried about the impact that AI could have on influencing people leading up to the election, especially when the content looks so realistic and many users who post it don’t label it as not real.
