Taylor Swift deepfakes originated from AI challenge, report says

The viral images of Swift have helped push nonconsensual deepfakes to the top of the political agenda, after years of concerns from experts that the technology was getting out of hand. — AP

The pornographic deepfakes of Taylor Swift that proliferated on social media late last month originated from an online challenge to break safety mechanisms designed to block people from generating lewd images with artificial intelligence, according to social network analysis company Graphika.

For weeks, users of Internet forum 4chan have taken part in daily competitions to find words and phrases that could help them bypass the filters on popular image-generation services, which include Microsoft Designer and OpenAI’s Dall-E, the researchers found. The ultimate goal was to create sexual images of prominent female figures such as singers and politicians.