AI Era New era of parasocial relationships just dropped: Swifties, as The Atlantic reports, are using ElevenLabs’ voice-generation tech — yes, the same AI voice generator that 4Chan users have already abused into oblivion — as a way to create fake audio of their idol Taylor Swift saying things she never actually said. The fake T-Swift voice clips are all over TikTok, and run the gamut from sweet pep talks to some markedly more offensive wealth-shaming. And while fan art and fiction has been a thing for quite some time, this eerily realistic voice tool takes fan-imagined scenarios to a whole new level of realism. And honestly? Really not sure if that’s a good thing. Reputation The most immediate concern, here, is the misinformation element. While a lot of the Taylor Swift generations are benign, this tool has, again, already been used to have some celebrities say some pretty awful stuff. (One 4Channer, for example, used the ElevenLabs beta AI tool to have an Emma Watson-like voice read from Hitler’s “Mein Kampf.”) And though Swifties themselves might be able to deduce what’s real and fake due to their own encyclopedic knowledge of Swiftian lore, it’s much more difficult for the broader public to do the same, especially as generative AI tools continue to get better and better. Swifties “know what [Taylor Swift] has said and what she hasn’t said, right? They’re almost immediately able to clock, ‘okay, this is an AI; she never said that,'” Lesley Willard, program director for…Swifties Are Using AI to Make Taylor Swift Say Nice Things to Them