Swifties for Trump Image Generator
What Happened?
Former president Donald Trump recently shared the images below on his social media network, Truth Social. The pictures of supposed Taylor Swift fans wearing “Swifties for Trump” t-shirts were actually AI-generated deepfakes (all but two of them). Trump posted them along with the words, “I accept!” as if Swift herself had endorsed him.
In response, the real Taylor Swift posted on Instagram, “I was made aware that AI of ‘me’ falsely endorsing Donald Trump’s presidential run was posted to his site. It really conjured up my fears around AI, and the dangers of spreading misinformation.” She then endorsed Trump’s opponent, Kamala Harris, for president.
How the Deepfakes Were Made
Just a few weeks prior to President Trump's post, Elon Musk's X (Twitter) platform added functionality to its new AI chatbot, Grok, to allow premium users to generate AI-generated images, including deepfakes. CivAI was able to identify that “Swifties for Trump” images were likely generated using Grok.
In the demo below, you can generate your own images of "Swifties for Trump". This demo uses the same underlying AI image generator used by X. See for yourself how easy it is to create convincing, yet fake, images of Swifties supporting Donald Trump with the click of a button.
Press the button below to generate an AI deepfake of 'Swifties for Trump'
Why It Matters
The deepfakes of Swifties posted by Trump display some obvious marks of AI-generated images. They look super airbrushed, have high-camera quality, everyone is really good-looking, and they make use of heavy bokeh and background blurring. But these aren’t things a typical person would necessarily notice. And the technology behind deepfakes will only improve.
X has 600 million users, and any one of them can pay just $8 to access Grok and its image generator, which was intentionally made to be extra permissive with user prompts. Now, almost anyone on earth with access to the internet and an X account can create realistic deepfake images to suit their needs, however nefarious. As deepfake technology is made more accessible, we can expect its societal impacts to multiply — from elections, to Hollywood movies, to scams.
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