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Fake, sexually explicit images of Taylor Swift likely generated by artificial intelligence spread rapidly across social media platforms this week, disturbing fans who saw them and reigniting calls from lawmakers to protect women and crack down on the platforms and technology that spread such images.<\/p>\n
One image shared by a user on X was viewed 47 million times before the account was suspended on Thursday. X suspended several accounts that posted the faked images of Ms. Swift, but the images were shared on other social media platforms and continued to spread despite those companies\u2019 efforts to remove them.<\/p>\n
While X said it was working to remove the images, fans of the pop superstar flooded the platform in protest. They posted related keywords, along with the sentence \u201cProtect Taylor Swift,\u201d in an effort to drown out the explicit images and make them more difficult to find.<\/p>\n
Reality Defender, a cybersecurity company focused on detecting A.I., determined with 90 percent confidence that the images were created using a diffusion model, an A.I.-driven technology accessible through more than 100,000 apps and publicly available models, said Ben Colman, the company\u2019s co-founder and chief executive.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
As the A.I. industry has boomed, companies have raced to release tools that enable users to create images, videos, text and audio recordings with simple prompts. The A.I. tools are wildly popular but have made it easier and cheaper than ever to create so-called deepfakes<\/a>, which portray people doing or saying things they have never done.<\/p>\n Researchers now fear that deepfakes are becoming a powerful disinformation force, enabling everyday internet users to create nonconsensual nude images or embarrassing portrayals of political candidates. Artificial intelligence was used to create fake robocalls of President Biden<\/a> during the New Hampshire primary, and Ms. Swift was featured this month in deepfake ads hawking cookware<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s always been a dark undercurrent of the internet, nonconsensual pornography of various sorts,\u201d said Oren Etzioni, a computer science professor at the University of Washington who works on deepfake detection. \u201cNow it\u2019s a new strain of it that\u2019s particularly noxious.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWe are going to see a tsunami of these A.I.-generated explicit images. The people who generated this see this as a success,\u201d Mr. Etzioni said.<\/p>\n X said it had a zero-tolerance policy toward the content. \u201cOur teams are actively removing all identified images and taking appropriate actions against the accounts responsible for posting them,\u201d a representative said in a statement. \u201cWe\u2019re closely monitoring the situation to ensure that any further violations are immediately addressed, and the content is removed.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n X has seen an increase in problematic content<\/a> including harassment, disinformation and hate speech since Elon Musk bought the service in 2022. He has loosened the website\u2019s content rules and fired, laid off or accepted the resignations of staff members who worked to remove such content. The platform also reinstated accounts that had been previously banned for violating rules.<\/p>\n Although many of the companies that produce generative A.I. tools ban their users from creating explicit imagery, people find ways to break the rules. \u201cIt\u2019s an arms race, and it seems that whenever somebody comes up with a guardrail, someone else figures out how to jailbreak,\u201d Mr. Etzioni said.<\/p>\n