“We are largely losing this battle with common sense when it comes to the use of generative AI,” Schnitt says, adding that if the videos are AI-based and Swift apologizes for it, the move could be a “touchstone moment” in opposition to the technology.
Lobo, who also posted with the hashtag #SwiftiesAgainstAI, doesn’t think Swift would comment on the backlash. He really thinks that a pop star, whether they used AI or not, would do so carefully in the future for fear of angering their fans. Unlike promotions, Lobo’s post on X highlighted Swift’s 2017 music video for “Look What You Made Me Do,” which was designed by a motion design studio. Many fans responded to Lobo’s post, noting that they lacked the craftsmanship and attention to detail in some of Swift’s previous music videos.
“Back then, when she wasn’t as big as she is now, she was careful enough to hire someone who could make something so beautifully and carefully crafted,” Lobo says. “I have a job that is being threatened by AI, and AI just completely disregards art and turns it into a product.”
While it’s unclear what AI models were used to generate the promotional videos, Reality Defender’s Colman says some models are trained on non-copyrighted data, and others veer into more unethical territory. But the main AI products offered by companies such as OpenAI AND Google are currently fighting to make training their models in copyrighted works legal under fair operate, much to the dismay of the artists who do it loss of paid work to artificial intelligence.
Colman says current generative AI models and “good prompting” can generate images used in Swift promotions in about two minutes. Many of these types of videos have been created using diffusion AI models that produce results comparable to Sora, an OpenAI video app that allows users to easily deepfake.
Google teased Swift’s scavenger hunt from the official Instagram accountalthough it is unclear whether the promotional videos featured in the challenge were shot using Google’s AI features. Earlier this year, Google started promoting a tool to convert photos into miniature videos generated by artificial intelligence. The latest version is called Veo 3. If Swift’s teasers were intended to encourage her fans to operate Google’s artificial intelligence suite, the plan appears to have backfired. This demographic may actually be among the most vocal and least likely to focus on AI tools.
Most of the people involved in the backlash are “huge fans,” Lobo says. They simply “don’t want AI infiltrating what we consider safe spaces.” As long as Swift remains still, the question will remain whether he did it at all.