Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer
Experts have for years warned about the nefarious potential of generative AI, sketching a paranoid, dystopian future full of identity theft, disinformation, deepfakes, and automated deception at scale. For one small population, this future is old news: celebrities.
In recent months, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and X have been filled with ads featuring celebrity voices and likenesses endorsing supplements, drop-shipped garbage, and insurance scams. According to 404 Media, AI clones of celebrities including “Joe Rogan, Taylor Swift, Steve Harvey, Ice Cube, Andrew Tate, Oprah, and the Rock” have been used to market “Medicare and Medicaid scams to millions of people on YouTube,” racking up hundreds of millions of views; this week, the New York Times reported that fake Swifts have also been deployed in a Facebook scam involving high-end cookware. Late last year, Scarlett Johansson sued a company that used her synthetic likeness to market AI content-generator apps. Around the same time, a disparate range of celebrities were compelled to warn fans about online clones. Gayle King encountered herself reading an ad for a weight-loss product she’d “never heard of” or used. “There’s a video out there promoting some dental plan with an AI version of me,” wrote Tom Hanks on Instagram. Mega-popular YouTuber MrBeast cautioned his followers not to fall for convincing but fake iPhone-giveaway ads. On YouTube and even X, Elon Musk replicas are still promising untold riches in exchange for a little bit of private information and — no big deal, don’t worry about it, it’s just a formality — some banking details.
Some celebrity encounters with AI are less scammy than weird. This week, some comedy podcasters used AI to reanimate George Carlin for an hour-long topical special, to which his daughter replied: no thank you. Others are straightforwardly predatory and exploitative: An investigation by NBC News found that, on both Google and Bing, surfacing nonconsensual deepfake porn portraying virtually any celebrity woman was trivially easy, as was finding the tools used to create it.
It’s usually a mistake to generalize from the experience of the most famous people in the world, but maybe not here. Celebrity culture anticipated the intoxicating and often disastrous consequences of getting a lot of attention decades before social media provided the entire population with a fair shot at microwaving their brains with sudden fame. Likewise, the AI celebrity-scam feeding frenzy might say something about what the future could be like for everyone else. Generative AI brought the cost of impersonating a celebrity down while bringing the plausibility of the impersonations up; suddenly, if you’re a scammer, synthesizing your very own Oprah is cheap and easy enough that it’s worth doing so in support of some pretty low-rent stuff — scams that, 20 years ago, might have taken the form of emails claiming to be from Bill Gates or a Nigerian prince suffering a run of bad luck.
If we assume that such tools will soon become even better, even cheaper, and even more widely accessible, then it’s easy to imagine how such techniques also get “democratized,” giving new life to everyday online grifts in ways that will, at least at first, feel genuinely shocking. Already, small-time scammers are using voice-cloning AI, which can synthesize pretty convincing imitations from brief phone conversations, to victimize regular people. Similarly, while people have been editing together crude fake celebrity nudes for about as long as the web has hosted images, the arrival of generative image and video tools almost immediately spawned a cottage industry of small-time nonconsensual porn producers, some of whom are making real money. As with scams, the question of when this becomes a serious problem for more people is largely a ruthless function of price, supply, demand, and lack of barriers or enforcement; also like scams, AI deepfake porn is already being used by — for lack of a better term — early adopters to threaten, blackmail, or just humiliate non-famous people in private and professional contexts.
The bad news is that MrBeast’s AI problems today might be yours tomorrow. The slightly less bad news is that the people who might be able to do something about them — lawmakers and regulators, sort of, but especially platform owners and businesses — tend to listen better when celebrities complain. (See: the entire history of social-media policies.) AI-scam regulation via celebrity lawsuit isn’t exactly a best-case scenario, of course, but it’s shaping up to be the one we get, for now.
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January 15, 2024 at 06:00PM
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Taylor Swift and Other Celebrities Already Live in AI Hell - New York Magazine
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