A bartender’s hand passing through a napkin. A disappearing coat hanger. A carousel horse with two heads. These were just some of the alleged clues that fans spotted in promo videos for Taylor Swift’s new album, The Life of a Showgirl, this weekend. But they weren’t Easter eggs about Swift’s music. They were, to their eyes, telltale indicators that the videos were purportedly made with generative AI.
“The first sign that it was AI was that it didn’t look great,” claims Marcela Lobo, a graphic designer in Brazil who has been a Swift fan since she was 12. “It was wonky, the shadows didn’t match, the windows and the painted piano, it looked like shit, basically.”
Fans, haters, and AI researchers all spotted similar things in the videos, which Swift promoted alongside Google as part of a scavenger hunt that would eventually unlock the lyric video for “The Fate of Ophelia,” the album’s lead single. Their commentary has flooded social media in the days since the hunt began, prompting some to come to Swift’s defense and even more to campaign generally about the use of AI. Swift has yet to comment on the backlash, leaving fans to speculate about how the videos were made and whether they used CGI or AI.
According to Ben Colman, CEO and cofounder of AI detection company Reality Defender, it seems “highly likely” some of the promo clips were AI-generated. He cited garbled and nonsensical text in some clips as one giveaway. Representatives for Swift and Google did not respond to requests for comment on this story.
AI-generated media has become ubiquitous in entertainment and advertising, even as artists and fans scoff at its use. Just last month Pew Research Center published the results of a survey that found nearly half of respondents would like a painting less if they learned it was made by AI; younger adults were even more likely to respond negatively to AI-generated media.
By Monday, many of the Life of a Showgirl promo videos had seemingly disappeared from YouTube, and some of the X posts containing them were deleted (searches for “Taylor Swift AI” are also restricted on X as of this writing, a move that was implemented previously to stop the spread of nonconsensual sexually-explicit deepfakes of Swift).