Pop star Taylor Swift has been accused of using artificial intelligence (AI) to promote her new album “The Life of a Showgirl”.
The artist made a treasure hunt-style promotion that challenged fans to find 12 orange doors in 12 cities around the world. Players of the game could then scan the QR codes found there.
The codes unlocked short videos, and some of them show the hallmarks of AI.
One video pictures an Art Nouveau-style bar with a framed picture on the wall that shows a blurred depiction of a house. A book is also missing letters, and the bartender’s middle finger blends with an orange napkin that he puts on the bar.
Another QR code in Barcelona led fans to a video of a gym in a high-rise building with weights and handles that don’t quite line up.
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AI being used in video is not new, as OpenAI brought out its Sora video-generator tool last year. Last week, the company said it was also launching a social media platform for users to share their AI-generated videos.
Even so, online users and Swift fans were dismayed at the singer, who has openly spoken about the dangers of AI deepfakes and AI replacing human labour and creativity.
“For someone who has made a big deal about how artists aren’t paid appropriately for like, most of her career, this is tone deaf AF,” one user wrote on Reddit.
“Nooooo, not Taylor too,” another user wrote on Reddit. “She’s too rich for this”.
Last year, users of the social media platform X shared AI-generated images of the singer purporting to show support for US President Donald Trump during his election campaign.
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“It really conjured up my fears around AI and the dangers of spreading misinformation,” she wrote in an Instagram post at the time.
Swift has not confirmed or denied whether the videos used in the album promotion were actually created by AI.
The outcry comes as AI company Anthropic on Monday lost a bid to dismiss parts of a copyright lawsuit brought by music publishers, led by Universal Music Group, over Anthropic’s alleged misuse of their song lyrics in its AI training.
There are many other ongoing copyright lawsuits between artists and their representatives and tech companies, including OpenAI, Meta, and Microsoft, over the unauthorised use of copyrighted works to train AI models – with mixed results in the cases that have been heard or settled so far.
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