Look What Google Made Taylor Swift Do
Why her AI videos should alarm us all.
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While the rest of Substack debates Taylor Swift’s feminism and lyricism, I’m more interested in the AI use in her promotional materials. The few mainstream articles I’ve seen about this throw around “alleged” and point to disappointed fans, but few actually show the undeniable evidence that her promotional Easter eggs are fully AI generated.
So let me do that.
To be clear: this content isn’t coming directly from TSHQ. It is the result of a collaboration with Google. She previously collaborated with them in 2023 for the release of 1989 (Taylor’s Version),
“With Google, Swift created 89 puzzles for her fans to decode. When solved, the puzzles brought fans closer to uncovering the tracks’ names. To do so, fans had to google “Taylor Swift”. After which, a blue vault appeared at the bottom of the results page. Unscrambling the letters on the screen would leave them with a keyword which, when keyed into the Google search bar, would complete the task.”
This campaign is similar, and seems to be entirely run/created by Google. Billboards of twelve orange doors appeared in twelve cities, each with a unique QR code that unlocked a unique video. Most fans were excited about the intricacy of these videos, and the clues they were supposed to pick up on, others immediately flagged that they looked AI generated.
And YouTube flagged that they were.
I don’t like to jump on AI accusations willy-nilly, so I took some time to actually look at the available videos carefully. The screenshots I saw looked bad, but they could’ve been bad CGI. However, once you see some of this stuff in motion, it’s actually undeniable that they are AI generated.
Some of the most egregious examples:
The London video is the worst offender, with a two-headed horse on a carousel, fingers that slip through a napkin (:13), inconsistent number of lamps, disappearing clothes hanger and nonsense text on a clothes tag (:28).
If you want to look for more evidence yourself, here are links to all the videos (and if any of them are taken down, feel free to reach out to me as I downloaded them all):
Barcelona • Berlin • Beverly Grove • Chicago • Las Vegas • London • Melbourne • Milan • Nashville • New York • Paris • Santa Monica
What about the fans?
In an ironic twist of AI speaking to AI, some fans used ChatGPT to help them solve the puzzle they were being presented with.
Others were beyond disappointed and started the #SwiftiesAgainstAI trend, which itself received backlash from fans who told them to “just leave” if they were disappointed. One fan defended the use because the AI prompters were creative workers themselves, so it’s not a labour issue. An excuse I find absurd, especially when amazing VFX teams are out there—and Swift allegedly had her music video sets hand painted, so why skimp on the cost here?
What is even more telling, and depressing, is the myriad commenters who are dismissive because they’re “jealous of people who have enough free time and mental energy to be upset about these things.” This encapsulates the uphill battle that creatives have to deal with while they are being edged out of the industry. It’s not bad enough that most people don’t care or don’t notice: the ones that do are ridiculed because it’s considered inconsequential.
So what happened?
A lot of people are attacking Swift directly for this turn because of the tight control that she proclaims to have on her creative. But this didn’t come from her team or her label. While there is absolutely no way that TSHQ didn’t have final approval over the creative, it is possible that the AI use was undisclosed or undersold, and whoever approved it just checked the boxes for all the clues they asked to be present, and didn’t really notice just how blatant the AI use was.
I hope that’s the case. I hope that Swift, who has been the victim of AI generated imagery to the degree that you can’t search Twitter for “Taylor Swift AI” because it was flooded with deepfake porn of her wouldn’t be happy to use AI for something like this. I would hope that Swift, who has spoken up about the rights of artists owning their works and being fairly compensated, didn’t rubber stamp the use of AI for these videos when she could easily afford to pay visual artists to create them, and make them look much better.
She was vocal about Ticketmaster fucking up: will she be vocal about this? If it happened without her consent, I hope so.
Either the most famous artist on the planet who can very easily hire creatives—or at the very least, demand that her brand collaborators hire creatives—approved this trashy output.
Or the most famous artist on the planet was deceived by a brand collaborator, despite her cachet, despite the money on the line, despite her explicit public stand on the matter. What does that mean for every single other artist/creative out there, who doesn’t have a fraction of the pull she does?
I sincerely don’t know which is worse.