Taylor Swift’s affinity for Le Creuset is real: Her kitchenware collection was featured on a Tumblr account dedicated to the pop star’s home decor, featured in her gift choices at a fan’s bridal shower and was shown in a Netflix documentary that was highlighted by Le Creuset. Creuset’s Facebook page.
What’s not real: Swift’s endorsement of the company’s products, which have appeared in recent weeks in ads on Facebook and other places featuring her face and voice.
The ads are among the many celebrity-focused scams made much more convincing by artificial intelligence. In a single week in October, actor Tom Hanks, journalist Gayle King and YouTube personality Mrbeast All said AI versions of themselves had been used, without permission, for misleading dental plan promotions, iPhone freebie offers and other ads.
In Swift’s case, experts said, artificial intelligence technology helped create a synthetic version of the singer’s voice, which was improvised using images of her along with clips showing Le Creuset Dutch ovens. In several ads, Swift’s cloned voice addressed “Swifties” (her fans of hers) and she said that she was “thrilled” to give out free cookware sets. All people had to do was click a button and answer a few questions before the day was over.
Le Creuset said it was not involved with the singer for any consumer gifts. The company urged buyers to check their official online accounts before clicking on suspicious ads. Representatives for Swift, named Time magazine’s Person of the Year in 2023, did not respond to requests for comment.
Celebrities have lent their celebrity to advertisers for as long as advertising has existed. Sometimes it has been reluctantly. More than three decades ago, Tom Waits sued Frito-Lay (and won nearly $2.5 million) after the corn chip company imitated the singer in a radio ad without his permission. Le Creuset’s scam campaign also included fabricated accounts of Martha Stewart and Oprah Winfrey, who in 2022 posted an exasperated video about the prevalence of fake ads on social media, emails, and websites falsely claiming to endorse weight loss gummies. weight.
Over the past year, major advances in artificial intelligence have made it much easier to produce an unauthorized digital replica of a real person. Audio parodies have been especially easy to produce and difficult to identify, said Siwei Lyu, a computer science professor who directs the University at Buffalo’s Media Forensics Laboratory.
The Le Creuset scam campaign was likely created using a text-to-speech service, Dr. Lyu said. These tools typically translate a script into an AI-generated voice, which can then be incorporated into existing video sequences using lip-syncing programs.
“These tools are becoming very accessible nowadays,” said Dr. Lyu, adding that it was possible to make a “decent quality video” in less than 45 minutes. “It’s becoming very easy and that’s why we’re seeing more of it.”
Dozens of separate but similar Le Creuset scam ads featuring Ms. Swift, many of them published this month, were visible late last week in Meta’s public ad library. (The company owns Facebook and Instagram). The campaign was also published on TikTok.
The ads directed viewers to websites that mimicked legitimate outlets like the Food Network, which featured fake news coverage of Le Creuset’s offering alongside fabricated customer testimonials. Participants were asked to pay a “small shipping fee of $9.96” for the cookware. Those who complied faced hidden monthly charges without ever receiving the promised cookware.
Some of the fake Le Creuset ads, like one that imitated interior designer Joanna Gaines, had a deceptive sheen of legitimacy on social media thanks to labels that identified them as sponsored posts or as coming from verified accounts.
In April, the Better Business Bureau warned consumers that fake celebrity scams powered by artificial intelligence were “more convincing than ever.” Victims were often left with higher-than-expected charges and no sign of the product they had ordered. Bankers have also reported attempts by scammers to use deep voices, or synthetic replicas of real people’s voices, to commit financial fraud.
Last year, several well-known people publicly distanced themselves from advertisements presenting your image or voice manipulated by AI.
This summer, fake ads spread online purporting to show country singer Luke Combs promoting weight loss gummies recommended to him by fellow country musician Lainey Wilson. Wilson posted a video on Instagram denouncing the ads and saying that “people will do anything to make a dollar, even if it’s lies.” Combs’ manager, Chris Kappy, also posted a video on Instagram denying his involvement in the gummy bear campaign and accusing foreign companies of using artificial intelligence to replicate Combs’ image.
“For other managers, AI is a scary thing and they are using it against us,” he wrote.
A TikTok spokesperson said the app’s ad policy requires advertisers to obtain consent for “any synthetic media that contains a public figure,” adding that TikTok’s community standards require creators to disclose “synthetic or manipulated media that show realistic scenes.
Meta said it took action on ads that violated its policies, which ban content that uses public figures in a deceptive way to try to scam users out of money. The company said it had taken legal action against some perpetrators of such schemes, but added that malicious ads were often able to evade Meta’s review systems by hiding their content.
With no federal laws in place to address AI scams, lawmakers have proposed legislation that would aim to limit their damage. Two bills introduced in Congress last year — the Deepfakes Accountability Act in the House and the No Fakes Act in the Senate — would require guardrails like content labels or permission to use someone’s voice or likeness. .
At least nine states, including California, Virginia, Florida and Hawaii, have laws regulating AI-generated content.
For now, Swift will likely remain a popular topic of AI experimentation. Synthetic versions of her voice regularly appear on TikTok, performing songs she never sang, sounding colorful to critics and serving as phone ringtones. An English-language interview she gave in 2021 on “Late Night With Seth Meyers” was dubbed with an artificial rendition of her voice speaking Mandarin. One website charges up to $20 for personalized voice messages from “Taylor Swift’s AI clone,” promising “that the voice she hears is indistinguishable from the real thing.”
