Taylor Swift’s artificial intelligence-generated image supporting Donald Trump, which she said inspired her to endorse Kamala Harris for president this week, came from an unexpected place.
The image, which sparked controversy in August after being shared by the former president on Truth Social, initially circulated with the caption “Taylor wants you to vote for Joe Biden” and was posted to a pro-Biden Facebook group with just 8,000 members in December 2023. The post was seen by NBC News, who conducted a reverse image search that found no instances of the image having been previously posted online.
After the AI-generated pro-Biden image featuring Swift was first posted to Facebook, it began circulating among pro-Biden online groups, primarily among Gen Xers and Baby Boomers who supported the then-candidate. The Facebook group where the image was first posted is a forum for Democrats to share pro-Biden and anti-Trump memes and information.
The image was also posted on X and Instagram’s messaging platform Threads, where it was shared by “The Outsiders” author SE Hinton on X in December, and was also posted to a liberal subreddit the same month.
“I’m a Baby Boomer supporting Biden,” X captioned a post of the image back in January.
The creator of the image, a Democrat who asked NBC News not to identify him to avoid backlash, said he was inspired by Swift’s endorsement of Biden in 2020 and used a generative AI platform to create the image from a text prompt: “Taylor Swift as Uncle Sam,” then added text on top of it in Photoshop.
On August 17, about nine months after the pro-Biden statement was posted, the pro-Trump X account, which has more than 340,000 followers, posted an edited version saying, “Taylor wants you to vote for Donald Trump.” The X account did not respond to a request for comment about whether it edited the image itself or where it came from. The next day, Trump posted a screenshot of X’s post on his Truth social account with the caption, “Accept!”
“I woke up one morning and someone texted me and sent me a photo that had been edited and said, ‘Is this you?’ and I was like, ‘Oh, this is an edited version of my original,'” the person who created the AI image of Swift endorsing Biden told NBC News in a phone interview. “I didn’t really care until I sat down and started watching the news, and then the news started blowing up and people started saying that Taylor might sue him and I was like, ‘Oh my God, what have I done?'”
Following the Trump-Harris presidential debate on Tuesday, Swift posted a statement in support of Harris on Instagram, citing the AI-generated image posted by Trump as one of the reasons she wanted to make her position public.
“I recently learned that an AI of ‘me’ falsely endorsing Donald Trump for president was posted on his site, which really brought back my fears about AI and the dangers of spreading misinformation,” Swift wrote. “This has led me to the conclusion that as a voter, I need to be very transparent about my actual plans for this election. The easiest way to combat misinformation is to tell the truth.”
Swift posted a link to the official voter registration website in her Instagram Story to show her support, and within 24 hours, more than 400,000 people had clicked on the link from her account.
“I agree with Taylor that AI, when used by bad actors, can be dangerous to democracy,” the AI imager said. “If this leads to increased regulation, I’m not only happy to comply, I’m happy the world will be a safer place.”
The AI image-maker, who is also an artist, said he began experimenting with AI to keep up with technological advances that he initially saw as a threat to his career, but then realized it could be a useful way to create political satire.
His public Facebook group is filled with content supporting the Democratic Party, starting with the Biden presidential campaign in 2020 and now the Harris presidential campaign.
“I never thought it would come to this,” he said, “and the goal was to bolster support for Joe Biden, because his communication was bad, his poll numbers were low, Trump was a looming threat, and I couldn’t just stand by and watch.”
