Taylor Swift, the queen mother of never taking a stance on anything that doesn’t directly impact her, has reversed course on AI — and her biggest fans are repulsed by that hypocrisy.
In partnership with Google and as a part of promo for her twelfth studio album “The Life Of A Show Girl,” a multi-city scavenger hunt sent the pop star’s rabid fan base searching for orange doors with QR codes. Once scanned, clues were revealed; ultimately, it led to a lyric video for the song “The Fate of Ophelia.” The video tips, however, were full of the stereotypical tells for AI — a disappearing limb on a squirrel, shadows that don’t match the lighting of a room, shapeshifting fonts, and other irregularities.
“The most disappointing aspect of this is how utterly hypocritical the use of AI is on Taylor’s project,” one longtime Swiftie seethed to Rolling Stone. “The fact that her/her team opted to go this route instead of hiring a real 3D/CGI artist when they have seemingly an endless budget (as a billionaire signed to a major record label) is a disappointing sign of the times.”
“I think it is very, very lazy and disappointing to use generative AI to create videos a human being very much could have done,” another die-hard fan said, this time on TikTok.
The reversal is particularly stinging to her fan base because Swift herself has criticized AI in the past after her likeness was stolen without her consent in graphic deepfaked imagery and then-candidate Donald Trump used an AI-generated Swift to endorse him during the election.
“It really conjured up my fears around AI and the dangers of spreading misinformation,” she wrote following those incidents.
Swift has also long advocated for artists owning their art throughout a six-year saga around buying back her master recordings; as many Swifties pointed out, she and her label could afford to pay human artists to create the visuals many times over.
Other fans slammed the AI turn over the environmental impact of AI on power grids and water supplies. And at the end of the day, many pointed out, the video just doesn’t look as good as many of her earlier efforts.
Earlier in her career, “when she wasn’t even as big as she is now, she was careful enough to hire someone to make something so beautifully and carefully done,” another longtime super-fan told Wired. “I have a job that is threatened by AI, and AI just completely disregards the art and turns it into a product.”
Neither Swift nor Google has responded to the controversy, but the AI clips themselves are no longer available on her YouTube channel. Perhaps she finally did “girl boss too close to the Sun” this time.
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