White House Urges Action Against AI-Generated Taylor Swift 'Deepfake' Porn

The White House has called for action against AI-generated pornographic images of Taylor Swift that have been widely shared on social media, with the administration labelling the images “shocking and disgusting”.

A series of explicit and altered photographs that appeared to be created using artificial intelligence (AI) were circulated on Thursday, prompting calls for the matter to be addressed by Congress.

At a press conference on Friday, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said that the images were "very shocking" and added that the government would "do everything we can to address this problem".

Jean-Pierre said that Congress should take legislative action on the issue and emphasised that social media companies could play a significant role in preventing the spread of such misinformation by enforcing their own rules.

The rise in sophisticated AI image generation tools that can produce realistic depictions of celebrities and landscapes has raised concerns that they may be used to create explicit content without consent. Sharing deepfakes images is now illegal under the newly introduced Online Safety Act in the UK.

While the major image generation tools have implemented restrictions on generating explicit images, some users have found workarounds to get around these controls. Other tools have been developed specifically to create explicit pornographic images.

Twitter, now self-described as X, said on Thursday that it is "actively removing all detected imagery".

It added: "We strictly enforce our policies against such content, which is prohibited from being posted on X."

Nudity or pornographic media, we are actively removing all such instances," it continued. "We are closely monitoring the situation to ensure immediate action on any further violations, and removal of relevant content. We are committed to maintaining a safe and respected environment for all users."

The social media site has been criticized for failing to adequately moderate content following significant staff layoffs, which has been attributed to the company's new owner Elon Musk.

Facebook owner Meta has also attempted to block what it deems as "violations" of its policies.

According to news website 404 Media, the images can be traced back to a group chat on messaging app Telegram.