Taylor Swift deepfakes: White House says 'alarming', seeks law

The White House has pitched for legislation to protect people from deepfakes generated by AI, after the spread of fake photos of Taylor Swift went viral on social media this week.

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre called the incident “alarming” and said it’s among the AI issues the Joe Biden administration has been prioritising, reports the Verge.

“Of course Congress should take legislative action. That’s how you deal with some of these issues. There should be legislation, obviously, to deal with this issue,” Jean-Pierre was quoted as saying.

The Swift deepfake images went viral on X, with one reaching 45 million views before being taken down. The platform was slow to respond, with the post staying up for around 17 hours.

In a statement, X said "posting non-consensual nudity (NCN) images is strictly prohibited on X and we have a zero-tolerance policy towards such content."

Jean-Pierre said social media platforms “have an important role to play in enforcing their own rules” to prevent this type of material from spreading.

Meanwhile, Microsoft Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella has said that the explicit Swift AI fakes are “alarming and terrible”. In an interview with NBC Nightly News, Nadella said “I think it behooves us to move fast on this.”

Swift is reportedly weighing possible legal action against the website responsible for generating the deepfakes.

Celebrity deepfake videos have become fairly common in India, too, with A-listers such Infosys chief N.R. Narayana Murthy, Amitabh Bachchan, Sachin Tendulkar, and a host of others falling victim to them. Internationally, deepfake videos have featured such diverse personalities and Microsoft founder Bill Gates and several Hollywood stars and South Korean K-pop performers.

A report in the Washington Post states that deepfake-detecting group Reality Defender said it had tracked "a deluge of nonconsensual pornographic material depicting Swift, particularly on X. Some images also made their way to Meta-owned Facebook and other social media platforms".