“It’s creepy, for a second I thought it was authentic”, exclaims a user. “This voice in artificial intelligence is going to be taken out of context and used against it [Taylor Swift] “, warns another. The object of their alarms? A video that was seen more than 3.5 million views on TikTok, since it was posted by an anonymous account four days ago.
On a background of images of Taylor Swift, we hear a voice similar to that of the American singer launch: “I don’t give a damn if my tickets are over a thousand dollars. I don’t do gigs for the poor. An allusion to the fiasco of the sale of concert tickets by the artist, in mid-November. Fans had to go through the Ticketmaster platform, which had experienced many bugs, preventing many of them from accessing it. The price of tickets then soared on resale sites. The sale was eventually cancelled.
Taylor Swift returned to the debacle in an Instagram story, expressing consideration for her fans, contrary to what the TikTok video says.
FAKE OFF
It’s hard to imagine Taylor Swift, who cares about her communication, let go of such remarks. There is no trace of such a recent statement by the singer. These words were created by an artificial intelligence, advance another Internet user on TikTok, who claims to be the creator of this sound. There are indeed several videos on his account where he makes remarks to artificial intelligence with the voice of Taylor Swift. Why did he do it? At the time of writing this article, this user had not responded to our requests, as well as Universal Music, Taylor Swift’s record company.
As several netizens pointed out in the comments, the viral video has the potential to be misleading, given the sound quality of the artificial voice. The Internet user who has accumulated millions of views with this video maintains the confusion, writing in the caption: “You heard it”, implying that it is indeed the singer, then indicates that he is acts as an edit using the #edit hashtag in the caption, among other hashtags.
Artificial intelligence opens up many creative possibilities: on February 8, David Guetta used artificial intelligence to imitate Eminem’s voice in concert. By posting the images on YouTube, the French DJ made it clearthus avoiding passing off bladders for lanterns.
In February it was a fake interview between Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and American podcaster Joe Reagan who had spoken from her. The quality of the voices had also been noticed there, but the dialogue, improbable, removed any doubt about the veracity of the interview. The YouTube channel that posted this fake exchange had also clearly indicated that it had been created with artificial intelligence.
The software used to make this fake interview puts in place some safeguards: the files used to reproduce a voice must therefore belong to the person who uses them. A barrier easily crossed by some Internet users.
