Madison Lawrence Tabbey was scrolling through X in late October when a post from a Wicked update account caught her attention. Ariana Grande, who stars in the movies as Glinda, had just liked a meme on Instagram about never wanting to see another AI-generated image again. Grande had also purportedly blocked a fan account that had made AI edits of her.
As Tabbey read through the mostly sympathetic replies, a very different message caught her eye. It was from a fellow Grande fan whose profile was mostly AI edits, showing Grande with different hairstyles and outfits. And, their reply said, they weren’t going to stop. Tabbey, a 33-year-old living in Nashville, Tennessee, couldn’t help but start arguing with them. “Oh so you were SERIOUS when you said you don’t care about poor communities not having water so that you can make AI pictures of ariana grande?” she shot back, referencing data centers draining resources and polluting cities like nearby Memphis. The account fired back at first, but amid a swarm of angry responses, it deactivated a few days later. It seemed like the owner wanted to argue and make people mad, but they might have taken things too far.
Grande is one of many celebrities and influencers who have openly rejected AI media exploiting their likenesses, but who continue to be prominently featured in it anyway, even among people who call themselves fans. As AI images and videos become ever simpler to produce, celebrities are facing down a mix of unsettled social norms and the incentives of an internet attention economy. And on “stan Twitter,” where pop culture accounts have grown into a lucrative fan-made media ecosystem, AI content has emerged as a growing genre, despite — or maybe because of — the outrage it provokes.
“Stan Twitter is very against AI just in general. So this goes against what people believe in, so then they’ll instantly get a comment, they’ll have the AI people retweet it, like it. So it’s just a very quick way to get money,” said Brandon, a 25-year-old who runs a verified fan account for Grande with close to 25,000 followers.
Brandon spoke on the condition that his account name and his last name be withheld, fearing retaliation from other people on stan Twitter. (Grande’s fans have been known to harass people; in 2019 the pop star told one critic under siege that she apologized on her fans’ behalf, but couldn’t stop them.) He tells The Verge he’s against most AI media, but he did ask ChatGPT to rank Grande’s top 10 songs that weren’t released as singles. He compiled the results into a thread that got over 1,000 likes. That seemed morally okay to him, as opposed to making AI pictures of Grande — commonly known as deepfakes — or Grande-inspired AI songs.
Grande’s position on the latter is clear. In a February 2024 interview, she called it “terrifying” that people were posting AI-generated imitations of her covering songs by other artists like Sabrina Carpenter and Dua Lipa. The rebuke hasn’t stopped them, though. Searching “ariana grande ai cover” on X still pulls up plenty of AI songs, although some have been removed by X in response to reports made by the original songs’ copyright owners.
Even the musician Grimes, who in 2023 encouraged fans to create AI songs based on her voice, said in October that the experience of having her likeness co-opted by AI “felt really weird and really uncomfortable.” She’s now calling for “international treaties” to regulate deepfakes.
“It’s just a very quick way to get money”
Grimes’ more recent comments follow the launch of an app that dramatically escalated AI media proliferation: OpenAI’s Sora video generator. Sora is built around a feature called “Cameos,” which lets anyone offer up their likeness for other users to play with. Many of the results were predictably offensive, and once they’re online, they’re nearly impossible to remove.
Grimes was reacting to videos of influencer and boxer Jake Paul, whose Cameo is available on Sora. Paul, who is an OpenAI investor, was the face of the launch. He said AI videos of him generated by Sora were viewed more than a billion times in the first week. Some of the viral ones portrayed Paul as gay, relying on homophobic stereotypes as the joke. The same thing happened when a self-identified homophobic British influencer offered his likeness to Sora, then again to the YouTuber IShowSpeed.
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