LONDON (AP) — Elon Musk's social media platform X has restored searches for Taylor Swift after temporarily blocking users from seeing some results as pornographic deepfake images of the singer circulated online.
Searches for the singer's name on the site Tuesday turned up a list of tweets as normal.
Sexually explicit and abusive fake images of Swift began circulating widely last week on X, formerly known as Twitter, making her the most famous victim of a scourge that tech platforms and anti-abuse groups have struggled to fix.
Unlike more conventional doctored images that have troubled celebrities in the past, the Swift images appear to have been created using an artificial intelligence image-generator that can instantly create new images from a written prompt.
After the images began spreading online, the singer’s devoted fanbase of “Swifties” quickly mobilized, launching a counteroffensive on X and a #ProtectTaylorSwift hashtag to flood it with more positive images of the pop star.
Persons:
— Elon, Taylor Swift, Swift, Joe Benarroch, Taylor, —, Swifties ”