SATIRE: Taylor Swift Generated by AI
Please note: this piece is satire, intended to be laughed at or ignored, not taken seriously. It was definitely written by an actual human and *not* an AI. Seriously.
CreativeCommons CC-BY-NC 4.0
Fans of Taylor Swift have been shocked by the revelation that the artist's image was generated entirely using experimental AI image generators. It was revealed that Swift is, in fact, Trevor Swift, a 200 pound truck driver from Surrey, who participated in a generative AI experiment in 2005. Asked by researchers to imagine any kind of image he liked and describe it to the AI, he says he asked it to create “a widely covered person in mass media, eliciting a range of public opinions and perceptions of her life and career. With a complex reputation that is examined and debated in various publications, yielding social approval and admiration globally while also being a subject of scrutiny and controversy.”
Swift says he was surprised and amazed when the AI spat out a press kit for a fictional female country singer. Complete with a set of staged-looking photos of a stunningly beautiful young woman, with long blonde curls and a devil-may-care expression. Convinced this image could sell millions of albums, he asked the AI to generate lyrics for a couple of album's worth of country songs, hired a singer who superficially resembled the woman in the generated images, and set about getting a record contract, eventually signing with Big Machine Records.
Fast-forward almost two decades, and the fictional singer-songwriter, whose work has been generated by increasingly sophisticated AI, has become a household name, with a huge fan base. Swift, who has been piling up the profits from his ownership of the Taylor Swift IP, has long since given up driving trucks, “I loved the lorries and I kept on doing it, kept on driving for as long as I could,” he says, “but I soon realise that generating enough Taylor Swift to satisfy the fans was going to be a full time job.”
Asked what he will do now that the cat is out of the bag, Swift is philosophical, “It's been a good run. Taylor Swift has made a lot of people happy. Maybe they'll keep buying the records and going to the concerts even though they know she's artificially generated.” If not? He laughs, a little nervously, “Well, I guess I'll be going back to traffic jams, truck stops and mince pies.”
Representatives from Taylor Swift's current record label, Republic Records, have made public statements claiming that the stories about Taylor Swift being artificially generated were themselves artificially generated. “Taylor Swift is definitely a real woman and a talented musical artist, who signed with us in 2018, and released a string of massive hit records through our company and its distributors. She performs live in all concerts billed as being Taylor Swift concerts, using her real female body and voice. Any suggestion that Taylor Swift was generated by AI and is played onstage by a series of body doubles is entirely fabricated.”
But a former Big Machine Records executive spoke to us a few days later, on conditions of anonymity, claiming that she was already suspicious by the time Taylor Swift's last album with the label was released. “Haven't you ever wondered why every photo and video looks like a slightly different woman? That's why the management switched to Republic, and that's why the four albums released with our company were ‘re-recorded’ and re-released. They knew the jig was up if they stayed with us. By changing record companies, they ensured anything we said about Taylor Swift being artificially generated by an AI would be dismissed as sour grapes.”
Fan reactions have been mixed, with some taking to social media to defend the deception, pointing out that all celebrity images are fabricated anyway, usually by groups of people who fabricate them professionally. “How many celebrity names were given to a baby by their parents?”, demanded one video comment, “How many celebrities look like their glamour photos when they get out of bed in the morning?” Others demand Taylor Swift be cancelled for leading them down the garden path, leading to increasingly hostile debates about whether it makes sense to cancel someone who's been artificially generated. “What are we trying to achieve?”, asked @ Taylor4Life on social media platform The X-Files (formerly known as the Twitter), “Sending a message to other artificially generated media personalities that they shouldn't be? That's kind of dumb.”
As for the music press, and the tech press, they seem to be thrilled to have some juicy celebrity gossip to write about. “It's organic clickbait,” said the pseudonymous author of the Synthetic Pain blog, covering the intersection of the music industry with bleeding edge technology, “the stories practically write themselves.”
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Image:
"Taylor Swift" by jennnnnyf, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.