How Taylor Swift Could Sue Trump for AI Images

0:03Hello, and welcome to the 404 Media Podcast, where we bring you unparalleled access to hidden worlds both online and IRR. 404 Media is a journalist-founded company and needs your support. To subscribe, go to 404media.co as well as bonus content every single week. Subscribers also get access to additional episodes where we respond to their best comments. Gain access to that content at 404media.co. I'm your host, Joseph, and this is the last, the final episode of the Joseph and Sam show with me. It's 4Fult Media co-founder Sam Cole. Yeah, final episode for now. We'll see. We'll see if we let the other guys back in.

0:46I don't know if we're ready to welcome them back, but I guess they're returning next week. Or we kick them back out again. I think this is a good show. I will say right at the top, Sam generated some impact from her recent investigation into NVIDIA, and how they're scraping YouTube and Netflix. And there's now a lawsuit by a specific YouTube creator against NVIDIA. We're going to much more detail in the subscribers only section of the show, not just on that story, but, you know, impacts more generally and how we approach it and that sort of thing. I just wanted to say that right at the top because I think it's pretty interesting.

1:34but we'll talk more about that later for the first story this is one that sam did as well swift as in taylor swift swift could sue trump under state law for fake ai endorsement uh i guess first of all sam what are these images that trump i was about to say tweeted but he he truthed them is that what a truth social post is i don't know actually that's a good question um i guess and tweeted isn't even a thing anymore it's posts on x um but we don't respect or acknowledge um but yeah so truth social which trump owns it's like a like a twitter lookalike twitter dupe um is where he posts these images and i guess i can just describe them and maybe we can link to them in the show notes or wherever but it's also on the site um so the images are very clearly ai generated in my opinion um they are pictures of like what looks like at a trump rally or something um they're of like women at like millennial i would say women at a trump rally and they're wearing t-shirts that say Swifties for Trump um and then there's one that's Taylor Swift in like an Uncle Sam outfit with like the top hat and like the flag behind her and she's pointing at the camera and says Taylor wants you to vote for Donald Trump um and then there's another one that's like it's like lots more images of women with like the Swifties for Trump shirts um mostly like long blonde hair white women um and the caption for one of them is about uh the recent taylor swift concert that got canceled because of terror threats in vienna um and the caption is like swifties have determined that they want a strong leader in the white house the swifties for trump movement is real and then like it's those images then there's another image it's actually a real image it's kind of mixed in with them of a woman who is selling these Swifties for Trump t-shirts which is interesting and she's very clearly at some kind of like Trump rally because the guys behind her are uh you know dudes um so yeah so it's it's a mix of mostly fake and AI generated images and I mean obviously fake as as as you say when people go see the piece and if they haven't already seen the images lots of people may already have like the one of taylor swift pointing at the camera saying taylor wants you to vote for donald trump i mean obviously that's a doctored image uh i suppose if you'd lived under a rock for the past five years you may not realize that the swifties for trump one at the top of the article is also fake i do think it's interesting that there's a real image mixed in there as well you know there's something to be even though this is very obvious there's something to be said as we learned from Russian disinformation campaigns even back to 2016, mixing in the real with the fake is an interesting approach.

4:49But of course, it's not just the images, it's what Trump posted as well. What was his little caption on these images? Yes. These are posts on Truth Social. It's like screenshots of other people's posts that he's posted. And his caption says, I accept. It's like the endorsement that he's accepting as like the Swifty fandom or, you know, Taylor Swift herself endorsing him for for president. I don't know. It's like it's so hard to tell with him. It's like, does he know that these are fake? I don't know. I mean, maybe not. You know, he's he's an older guy. Maybe his eyesight's not so good. he's getting tricked by Facebook AI images just like a lot of people are right now so or you know he fully knows they're fake and is you know doing like a tongue in cheek thing but either way he's like making it seem like an endorsement has happened from Swifties which is not a fandom I would fuck with personally but yeah more like a fandom stand I wouldn't mess with it so yeah that was his little contribution to the to the imagery and then he posted like a dozen more times directly after that it's like this man is prolific on truth social i don't know if you've i don't recommend you do you follow him do you have a truth social account like because i've never interacted with that website because fortunately i don't really cover extremism or yeah or politics like do you have an account i do um but i don't like look at the platform ever unless something newsworthy has happened on it which i guess you know it's like how do you know something is happening unless you're on it but thankfully there are lots like you wait for somebody to tweet about it and then you go look yeah exactly i wait for it to like trickle over to twitter and then i and then i go say okay what's going on this this other crazy website so so trump posts those photos mix of real and ai and his caption as we say we don't know whether it's sincere or not but it almost doesn't matter because he's at least misleading about that sort of thing.

7:04Before we get into sort of our contribution to this story, because I'm sure people have already read this in lots of places, but we try to always differentiate our coverage a little bit. Before we get to that, what were people's reactions, maybe on Truth Social or just on Twitter or wherever, about these AI images? Were people saying, God, this is really, really stupid? Or were people outraged? Like, what was the deal? I mean, it was trending on Twitter. So like people were talking about it for sure. I think most people were like, this is very like, this is asinine. This is more AI being used for stupid purposes.

7:42The Swifties obviously were pissed. Like I said, I like don't mess with that fandom. When Taylor Swift was being deep faked and it went really well, Taylor Swift is always being deep faked. Like that's just a perpetual thing that's happening. but there was a... I mean, actually, just before you move on, I think that's a really good point. And you were uniquely positioned to talk about that as the first reporter who discovered deepfakes. Way back then, what do you mean Taylor Swift was always deepfaked? Yeah, I mean, Taylor Swift was like one of the first celebrities being targeted for deepfakes in 2017, 2018, when it was really first getting going.

8:22um she was like one of the first very viral celebrities because there's just so many images of her out there um people just and you know people are perpetually horny for taylor swift so it's like she's just in the mix with like emma watson and all the others that people were already making like fake nudes of using photoshop but um then with deep fakes they had this added layer of being able to make like non-consensual AI generated versions of what they're already making and then it's just gotten worse and worse throughout the years so very recently it's like January I think Taylor Swift deepfakes excuse me went very viral on Twitter and they were like hardcore gangbang images like fake obviously um and that became such like a incident that the white house commented um so it was like yeah like it really blew up there were lots of like lawmakers saying we should write new laws to cover this sort of scenario where taylor swift can no longer be deepfaked, not hers specifically, but that was kind of the impetus.

9:40And at that point, that was, you know, Swifties were like reporting and taking down, like reporting to get taken down all these images on Twitter of her being deepfaked into porn. So yeah, that's kind of how it ties back into the Swifties for Trump thing is that they were immediately like, no, she doesn't even like Trump. Like she's very, very outspoken about him in the past. They were like, let's set that record straight. you know, right away. Yeah. I just find it interesting that Taylor Swift is somehow appearing in all of these AI deepfake stories. As you've, as you said, it started simply because she's so mega popular that there's so many videos and photos of her already that created like, unfortunately, a really rich like corpus for people who were first making deepfakes to like rely on and like nowadays it's like jesus i've seen you know you can make a deep fake with just one image i've literally seen that at defcon like the other week so yeah interesting how it was there then of course she was in that microsoft bing stuff that you you reported with emmanuel and that was i guess sort of the same sort of thing just because she is you know fascicized by a lot of people and is putting non-consensual pornography and now she's tied into this story because maybe she doesn't like this, but she is a political force and her fans are very, very powerful and very, very passionate people.

11:06So you mentioned that in that middle example of the non-consensual images that went viral on Twitter a while ago, a bunch of lawmakers were saying, well, we need to make laws so this doesn't happen again. Okay. Interesting development. Well, a law did actually come to fruition. I don't know if it was specifically from that, but like, what is this law in Tennessee, I think. What's the deal with that? Yeah. And yeah, also just to back up to something you said before we get into that, just as what Taylor served as a political force, whether she likes it or not. Something really funny happens a couple of years ago.

11:46I think it was last year. It was like 2023. She posted just like a very bland, like, make sure you raise your voice. and register to vote in and go to the polls type post like not even an endorsement and she put that on Instagram stories with a link to vote.org and there were more than 35 ,000 new registrations as a result of that post which is crazy so yeah it's like yeah it's like she does have this influence that I think she knows and like is also so popular that an endorsement from Taylor Swift would be you know astronomical it would be really wild uh and we've seen that happen in the past so anyway um yeah so I um I this came to my attention uh from uh Twitter a guy named Mike Dunford.

12:51His Twitter bio says he's a lawyer and he was posting about this Tennessee law that has to do with addressing AI fakes and right to publicity and laws like that. So that's got me kind of digging around and looking at this law, which just went into effect in July. It's called the Ensuring Likeness, Voice, and Image Security Act, which lawmakers love an acronym. It's ELVIS. That's a pretty good one. I'll give them that. It's a good one. It's a good one. Usually they're not very good, but like, okay, that's pretty clever. I'll let them have that. Yeah. We'll hand it to them. But the law amends a previous law and adds voice as a protectable and inheritable asset.

13:49So, you know, I could read a little bit from the relevant part of the law, but it's saying that anyone who knowingly uses or infringes upon the use of an individual's name, photograph, voice, or likeness in any medium in any manner directed to any person other than such individual for purposes of advertising, merchandise, goods, services, fundraising, solicitation of donations, purchases of products, merchandise, goods, goods, services. It goes on forever. But obviously, in there is you could definitely count fundraising for a campaign and faking an endorsement. If you do any of that without the permission of that person, then you're liable for a civil action.

14:38So it's just an interesting coincidence that this was passed and just went into effect in July in Tennessee because Taylor owns a lot of companies and they are, as far as I know, mostly, if not all of them are based in Tennessee because she, um, lived in Nashville and grew up in Nashville. So, um, obviously that's where the music industry is. So yeah, it's like if she wanted to, which I don't want to speculate too much about what Taylor Swift does and doesn't want to do, But if she wanted to, she could bring a lawsuit against Trump in Tennessee on the grounds of this new law specifically. And really, she could bring a lawsuit against Trump in a lot of places under some already established pretty effective defamation law anyway.

15:35So it's not like we needed a new fancy law to cover this already. But, you know, this is such a blatant case of, you know, it's falsifying an endorsement like that goes right under, you know, good services and donations, solicitation of donations and fundraising. So, yeah, I thought that was a really interesting timing, I guess. The whole Trump's obsession with Swift is also just interesting. He shares that with Elon Musk, which I got into a little bit in the article. But yeah, these guys are just super into being creepy about her in particular. So I don't know. I mean, I would like to see it happen.

16:22I would like to see her sue him. But that's just my my personal opinion. it would be interesting to see. Yeah I guess my last question just on that on the idea of her suing Trump there is of course a massive maybe not imbalance but like power dynamic here where of course people are deep faked and have non-consensual AI images generated of them every single day at this point I don't think that's an exaggeration at all and a massive number of them are going to be entirely normal people who do not have an army of lawyers to help them. I guess just briefly, what do you make of that sort of, well, yeah, I will say it, that imbalance between, you know, rich, powerful people at least having the option to do this, and then, you know, less well-off people maybe not being able to do it.

17:15Or maybe I'm wrong. Like, is it more that we just need to see how these laws are actually tested and whether quote-unquote ordinary people can use them as well or like what do you think of that yeah i mean it's that's honestly that's like the elephant in the room of all of this is like celebrities do have the power to sue people for to sue for the um for misrepresenting their likeness because their likeness is what makes them money like that's that is what it boils down to so So the average person doesn't have the same kind of like protection that a celebrity might and doesn't have like the resources that a celebrity or an influencer does.

18:02It's really expensive to go to court. It's hard. It's hard to get a lawyer. It's hard to actually build a case. um so yeah a lot of people just get deep faked all the time and it just they just have to deal with it or hope that sites get um get their stuff taken down and that's something that i've been writing about a bit recently is just like how some of these federal laws that are coming about with regards to deep fakes um are still leaving ordinary people behind um i know there's a lot lot of people with sharper, much sharper legal minds than I have working on this. So I think eventually we'll get there and we'll have, you know, a right to our own likenesses that will be more established just because we all live and work on the internet these days.

18:53A lot of us do, even if we're not super celebrities. So yeah, I think it's something that's like, it's people are working on solutions for that but it's still really it's really hard we not everyone has billions of dollars to throw at um you know someone using using their likeness in ai so but taylor swift does uh so if she wanted to she could we we will see what 404 media's reaction is when trump posts an ai generated endorsement from me oh it's on an english guy you know we'll see what happens there. All right. We will leave that there. When we come back, we're going to talk about how US authorities are digging into a massive goldmine of encrypted message intelligence.

19:44We'll be right back after this.

20:08all right and we are back the headline of this article which we haven't actually published yet we're trying something a little bit different which is where we've edited well sam's edited the piece i haven't got around to doing the edits yet because it's just the two of us trying to do everything you know um so maybe this headline will change because we haven't actually agreed on the headline um so uh i think this is accurate but you know it may not reach the final version u.s feds are tapping a half billion encrypted messaging gold mine this is about the encrypted phone company called sky um sam i feel like i talk about so many different encrypted phone companies with so many obscure weird ass names had you had you heard of the sky one before have I mentioned that one before?

20:58I feel like I've heard of it. You do talk a lot about a lot of phones. For a guy that doesn't have a phone, you talk a lot about phones. So you've covered it before in the past, right? Like I feel bad for not having like more familiarity on what Sky is. I was like, damn, I should have been reading Motherboard. It's okay. It's okay because there's all of these companies and they all get hacked or you'll get run by the authorities or they all shut down or whatever and like uh i think we all do this sometimes me especially we get tunnel vision but we're like well everybody knows about this story it's like they don't yeah oh okay it's just so explain to like me and also the the the lay listener what is the normal people yeah yeah so sky is part was part of the the i call it the underground encrypted phone industry i'm sure they might push back against some of that but it's companies like sky encrochat phantom secure cypher ennetcom these are not your apples and googles although they use apple and google devices and generally what these companies do including sky is that um they will source um ordinary mobile phones iphones or android devices they will add their own software onto them primarily that's an encrypted messaging app but there's also some other features as well um and then a network of distributors will sell it and they cost thousands of dollars for a six-month subscription in part because they're like a closed network and you can only have one sky device speak to another sky device um and they become and became very very popular with serious drug traffickers whereas most of us will use Signal or Wicca, not Wicca anymore, Amazon killed it, Wire or Freema or whatever, drug traffickers use a ton of these different companies.

22:59And as I said, law enforcement often targets them. And in this case, the Europeans, I think it was the Belgian authorities and then some other agencies, they hacked into and obtained a billion messages then they say decrypted half a billion messages that is an insane intelligence gold mine and what is happening now as this article shows is that u.s authorities are finally tapping into that data um i've seen or i had seen like one or two cases where there's a mention of Sky in these court records. But now there's like three or four cases. Oh, okay, this is a thing. Like HSI, Homeland Security Investigations, part of DHS, they're getting access to it.

23:50Another case, the DEA is at least working on it. I need to double check if they were specifically handling the data. But US authorities are now getting this information. And the news more specifically on our case, I was about to open the article on the website. wait it's not it doesn't exist yet so i have to go through the unedited document it's about a guy called milo's randonich and he was one of these people allegedly from the balkans and and that part of the world smuggling massive quantities of cocaine in commercial um ships so this is very very common this is how sort of the very large drug traffickers do it they will use maritime vessels from south america you know columbia ecuador that sort of thing they'll then smuggle up massive amounts of cocaine into the united states and they can maybe can be sold there and then it could ship off to europe as well or sometimes it will go straight uh to europe so randonich and i kind of just want to call him by his nickname which is pirate of the unknown which is the sickest nickname for a drug trafficker I think I've ever heard and I cover these guys a lot it's like that's dope how'd you get that to be to be clear I'm sure he's actually a very bad guy and some other people in here are bad as well but that's a pretty good nickname I'll give him I don't know like just like I don't want to like give this guy too much credit but like some of like the way that it's described in the um the DOJ write-up and then what we write about it's kind of kicks ass like he was moving it's not just like a lot of cocaine because you had written tons of cocaine and i was like okay does like surely he means tons like a lot not like literally ton oh yeah measurement two and a half tons of coke is what this guy was moving on commercial vessels that's insane yeah it is insane and i'm again i'm stressing not endorsing but no yeah it is impressive logistically and I think even some of my law enforcement contacts would actually agree with that at least some some of the ones I've spoken to about encrypted phone companies but there was also a point you've highlighted uh in the edit and I'm sorry I'm putting you on blast but it says your comment on this it says sorry but this rules uh what are you referring to he was they caught him right before he was planning to captain a racing yacht in an international competition in italy that fucking rules yeah it's pretty funny and i heard of the unknown is like i don't know it's most interesting man in the world maybe i i find it really funny that the doj explicitly put that in their press release like they didn't need to do that but like in the first or second graph that like we arrested him or the italian authorities arrested him just before this racing yacht competition that's that's an interesting detail because i would have let him race oh yeah make it a bit more exciting and then the italian authorities have to get their own yacht and like film it and do that sort of thing um so he he was arrested a while ago that was like back in october 2023 and i did see the case at the time and i was just like oh that's a a pretty big deal drug trafficker.

27:19That's always interesting. At the time, I don't think there was any mention of his use of Sky messages. And if there was, it certainly wasn't very explicit. But then this newly unsealed court document shared with us by our friends at Court Watch, and they're going to publish this article as well, it's an affidavit with an application for a search warrant for some phones that Pirate of the Unknown was holding when he was arrested as an iPhone and a couple of Samsungs. But it mentions in there that the US has obtained his Sky messages from the European authorities. And apparently in there, there's all of these conversations about the cocaine trafficking, photographs of parts of one ship that was used transport the narcotics, the geolocation data for that ship, and a reference to specific attempts to load cocaine aboard the ship.

28:19And then, very interestingly, of course, these drug traffickers use these ostensibly end-to-end encrypted messaging platforms so they can talk more openly. When I've read Sky Messages, EncroChat ones, and Anon ones as well, Anon being the one the FBI secretly ran, you go through the messages and they're barely using code words they're just like straight up saying this but the the well the ones i've seen are the the kilograms of cocaine of cocaine onto a ship i didn't see many they were mentioning tons except in this case uh but they're talking openly and in there as well apparently there's a an image of a receipt showing his real name and phone number details of international travel that lines up with sort of border crossings and travel reservations that the authorities also have, photographs of a vehicle registered to a member of his yacht racing team, and then also reference to what appears to be a birthday on his daughter's true birth date.

29:18So basically what it shows is the cops will dig through all of this data to find any sort of link between the drug trafficking personia, in which this case is Pirate of the Unknown, and then the real-life identity of this Milo's character. So that's already interesting. And just to be clear, I don't think the US authorities have this whole database of half a billion messages and they're just rummaging through it. I don't think they're doing a phishing expedition. We haven't seen any evidence of that. What they seem to be doing is doing requests to European authorities for data on specific devices or specific people.

30:01Maybe I'm wrong on that, but that's the indication that we're seeing in these court documents so far. But as I mentioned, that is just the latest case and that's sort of like the reason we're covering it now is because there are other ones as well. There is another guy called, I'm scrolling through the document, Gojik, I believe. And he's connected to one of the largest against cocaine and drug seizures in US history. And he was allegedly smuggling a billion dollars worth of cocaine, I think in one shipment, which is truly staggering. Like when I was writing my book on Anam, I thought I came across some big drug shipments and I did, but then somehow there's always going to be a bigger fish.

30:51And then Tom Brewster from Forbes, he actually kindly sent me this court document a while ago. He writes the Wiretap newsletter along with Court Watch. He's like the other Pacer wizard who's just insane at getting really good court records. So definitely go check that out as well. He sent that just because he knows I'm into encrypted phones. Didn't cover it at the time, but now there's an excuse to because there's a clear trend. And then I guess just the last one I mentioned, I'll mention, is a guy called Didani and he allegedly was also involved in cocaine trafficking but he and i've read his sky messages because they're actually available in some court documents i saw these a couple of years ago when i was doing my book but he discussed making some sort of torpedo submarine which would contain the cocaine and which would then be fired underwater and they could smuggle it in that way uh and i mean it's it's just crazy the sort of shit that we see inside these encrypted messaging halls and I'm sure law enforcement is very glad and happy about that but even as just a journalist reading through them not only do you see the incredible smuggling techniques that some of these people do there's also just the callousness at which they order assassinations how money is laundered all of this sort of stuff this series of operations against the encryptophone industry um anon the fbi's one uh phantom secure less so because they didn't get a backdoor but definitely encrochat which was hacked and sky again which was hacked i just cannot think of another sort of law enforcement coup which has probably been as insightful um as this you know um all right i think that's everything i wanted to say on that i hope that the the headline does reflect what we actually publish i guess we're going to go figure that out uh in a minute after this i think we have to we'll keep it that uh we'll keep it that close just because we've already said it on here maybe we've already said the headline so let's ship it okay okay well there we go okay it's out of our hands now um if you are listening to the free version of the podcast i will now play us out but if you are a paying 404 media subscriber as i mentioned we're going to talk about sam's impact of generating a lawsuit against nvidia for scraping youtube but we're also going to talk about you know, impacts more generally how we generate it and why, you can subscribe and gain access to that content at 404media.co.

33:46As a reminder, 404 Media is journalist-founded and supported by subscribers. If you wish to subscribe to 404 Media and directly support our work, please go to 404media.co. You'll get unlimited access to our articles and an ad-free version of this podcast. You'll also get to listen to the subscribers only section where we talk about a bonus story each week. This podcast is made in partnership with Kaleidoscope. Another way to support us is by leaving a five star rating and review for the podcast. That stuff really does help us out. This has been 404 Media. We will see you again next week.