Fans Call on Taylor Swift to ‘Do Better’ After Accusations of Using AI for Promo Videos

“We’re really losing this battle against common sense when it comes to using generative AI,” Schnitt says, adding that if the videos are AI and Swift apologizes for them, the move could be “a watershed moment” in the fight against the technology.

Lobo, who also posted a message using the hashtag #SwiftiesAgainstAI, doesn’t think Swift will comment on the backlash. She thinks the pop star, whether she has used AI or not, will be hesitant to do so in the future for fear of angering her fans. Unlike the promos, Lobo’s X post highlighted Swift’s 2017 lyric video for the song “Look What You Made Me Do,” designed by a motion design studio. Many fans responded to Lobo’s post by pointing out that they missed the artistry and attention to detail in some of Swift’s previous lyric videos.

“Back then, when she wasn’t even as big as she is now, she was cautious enough to hire someone to make something so beautiful and polished,” Lobo says. “I have a job that is threatened by AI, and AI completely ignores art and turns it into a product.”

While it’s unclear which, if any, AI models were used to generate the promotional videos, Reality Defender’s Colman says some models are trained on non-copyrighted data and others that venture into more unethical territory. But consumer AI products from companies like OpenAI and Google are currently fighting to legalize training their models on copyrighted works under fair use, much to the dismay of artists who are losing paid work to AI.

Colman says current generative AI models and a “good prompt” could generate the types of images used in Swift’s promotions in about two minutes. Many of these types of videos are made with streaming AI models, which produce a result comparable to Sora, OpenAI’s video app that gave users the ability to easily fake themselves.

Google teased Swift’s scavenger hunt from its official Instagram account, although it’s unclear whether the promotional videos that were part of the challenge were made with Google’s AI features. Earlier this year, Google began promoting a tool to convert photos into short AI-generated videos. The latest iteration is called Veo 3. If Swift’s teasers were supposed to entice her fans to use Google’s AI suite, the plan seems to have backfired. This demographic may actually be among the loudest and least likely people to turn to AI tools.

Most of those involved in the backlash are “big fans,” Lobo says, they “just don’t want AI to infiltrate what we consider a safe space.” As long as Swift remains silent, the question remains whether this is indeed the case.