Fake Sexual Images of Taylor Swift, Made With AI, Spread to Tens of Millions Before Being Taken Down

The images circulated on X for most of a day; one was viewed 47 million times. The platform eventually blocked searches for the singer's name. The White House called the episode 'alarming' and urged Congress to act.

Sexually explicit images of Taylor Swift, generated by artificial intelligence, spread across X — the platform formerly called Twitter — over the past two days before the company removed them. One post was seen 47 million times before it came down, according to reports; it stayed up for about seventeen hours. Swift's fans organized to bury the images under a flood of real ones, and by this evening X had blocked searches for her name altogether.

The images appear to have been made with a mainstream image-generation tool, using wording chosen to slip past its filters, and were first shared in a Telegram group where such images are traded. Swift is not the first woman this has been done to — fake pornography has been the main use of these tools since they appeared, mostly against women who are not famous — but she is the most famous, and the reaction has been correspondingly loud.

The White House press secretary called the episode "alarming" today and said Congress should legislate. Several members said they would introduce bills; there is currently no federal law against creating or sharing sexual deepfakes of adults, and the state laws that exist are a patchwork. Microsoft, whose image tool may have been used, said it was strengthening its safeguards.

The tools that made the images are eighteen months old and available to anyone. The rules for what can be done with them are, as of tonight, still being written.