Taylor Swift nude!

(Also thoughts on Soup Nazis attacking Mona Lisa)

Newsweek reported, “Taylor Swift has received a boost in the wake of sexually explicit AI images portraying her being circulated on social media, with a powerhouse attorney offering to represent her should she take legal action.

“AI images are pictures generated through artificial intelligence software using a text prompt. This can be done without a person's consent. Among the AI images of Swift being shared are some that depict her posing inappropriately while at a Kansas City Chiefs game. The pop star has attended several of the NFL team's games this season amid her romance with Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce.

“The offensive AI images originated on the AI celebrity porn website Celeb Jihad on January 15. They were subsequently shared on X, formerly Twitter, this week, clocking up millions of views before the associated accounts were suspended.

“On Monday, lewd AI images portraying Swift were posted by X account @FloridaPigMan. They have since been removed for violating the social media platform’s rules. Another sexually explicit fake photo of Swift was posted on the website Rule 34 on November 21, 2023. It now appears to have been removed.”

The pop star, who became America’s sourheart after showing up at NFL games rooting for her boyfriend’s team, suddenly became a damsel in distress in the media’s eyes because someone photoshopped her as a porn star. The goal, however, is not to save milady’s reputation and her honor, but to regulate what the media describes as artificial intelligence.

What distinguishes AI from photoshop is called marketing. Adobe and others use the label AI to peddle their latest photoshop offerings. Why not call it gluten-free while they are at it?

Censors, too, are using the AI label to sell the public on their product. This is a crisis manufactured by Democrats to expand their power.

The Verge reported, “Legislation needs to be passed to protect people from fake sexual images generated by AI, the White House said this afternoon. The statement, from White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, came in response to a question about the spread of fake sexualized photos of Taylor Swift on social media this week.

“Jean-Pierre called the incident alarming and said it’s among the AI issues the Biden administration has been prioritizing.”

An administration that refuses to uphold federal law and close the border is alarmed that Celeb Jihad is depicting a billionaire singer as a sex object.

Apparently the photoshopping is very good. I have not seen said pictures which seem to have disappeared from the Internet almost as swiftly as they appeared.

The Daily Mail reported, “The scandal is the latest of many involving Celeb Jihad, which was created by its anonymous founder in 2008.

“Along with deepfakes — the name given to hyper-realistic fake content — of Swift and other stars, the website has also published droves of leaked explicit photos of other celebrities, including images that were hacked from their cellphones.

“Astonishingly, the site claims its content is ‘satire’ and states it is ‘not a pornographic website.’

“Swift’s legal team previously issued a warning to Celeb Jihad in 2011 after it published a faked photo which depicted the singer topless. The picture appeared with the caption ‘Taylor Swift Topless Private Pic Leaked?’

“At the time, her lawyers threatened to file a trademark-infringement suit and accused it of spreading ‘false pornographic images’ and ‘false news.’ The website appears to have published hundreds, and potentially thousands, more faked images of Swift since it was started.”

I am sorry but I really don’t care about Miss Swift. Many are those who hate her for some reason. That she endorsed Biden does not bother me because I am not moronophobic. To paraphrase George Carlin, half of all Americans are below the intelligence of the average American.

Speaking of Mister Carlin, the late comedian is involved in his own AI controversy.

NBC reported, “The estate of comedy legend George Carlin has filed a lawsuit against the makers of an hour-long video featuring a version of him made using artificial intelligence, accusing them of stealing ‘a great American artist’s work.’

“A voice sounding remarkably like the comedian, who died of heart failure in 2008, appears on a comedy special titled George Carlin: I’m glad I’m dead, which was uploaded to YouTube earlier this month by the Dudesy channel.”

If the title is any indication of the quality of the writing, the special might be amusing.

NBC said, “There is no visual representation of Carlin — the video instead shows a series of AI-generated images — but the voice touches on familiar themes such as religion and politics, while also discussing the comedian’s own death.”

Hmm. This reminds me of Vaughn Meader’s vocal impressions of President Kennedy in the 1960s. His career ended in Dallas when Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated JFK. Also, many are the old Warner Brothers cartoons from the 1930s that depict various Hollywood celebrities as well.

But copyright laws are above my pay grade. I do observe, however, that both Swift and Carlin’s heirs already have a recourse and a remedy in existing law. The cases may go either way. I can see the defense that the impersonations are a satire of a public figure. I can also see the argument that it is copyright infringement.

That is for the courts to decide.

Which is my whole point against regulating AI. Let the courts figure out whether or not this is a tort. Congress can butt out. The government’s duty is not to protect people from speech but to protect free speech.

That liberals are calling for government to protect us from artificial intelligence warns my natural intelligence that this will be used to censor me.

The New York Times reported last month, “Five Ways AI Could Be Regulated.” I don’t want any one of them.

NYT said, “Since 2021, [Red] China has moved swiftly in rolling out regulations on recommendation algorithms, synthetic content like deep fakes, and generative A.I. The rules ban price discrimination by recommendation algorithms on social media, for instance. AI makers must label synthetic AI-generated content. And draft rules for generative AI, like OpenAI’s chatbot, would require training data and the content the technology creates to be true and accurate, which many view as an attempt to censor what the systems say.”

True and accurate? In the eyes of whom? NYT lied about Russian interference in the 2016 election. NYT lied about covid. NYT lied about Hunter’s laptop. All of these lies (and more) were promoted by the government. The FBI used the Russian interference lie as an excuse to spy on Trump. Fauci and the CDC used covid to shut the country down. The FBI used the lies about the laptop to kill a story that would have re-elected President Trump.

Instead of stripping the government of its power to lie and to censor, NYT wants to supercharge the government’s power to block the public from learning the truth. I have a whole bucket of swear words to dump on their heads.

NYT’s story ended, “Many experts have said that effective AI regulation will need global collaboration. So far, such diplomatic efforts have produced few concrete results. One idea that has been floated is the creation of an international agency, akin to the International Atomic Energy Agency that was created to limit the spread of nuclear weapons. A challenge will be overcoming the geopolitical distrust, economic competition and nationalistic impulses that have become so intertwined with the development of AI.”

The IAEE regulates governments, not individuals.

Miss Swift can sing what she wants, date who she wants and root for the team she wants, but I refuse to sacrifice my God-given rights at the altar of Taylor Swift.

* * *

Taylor Swift is nowhere near the threat to Western civilization that the Soup Nazis are. Oh, they are not saying “no soup for you” as the one in Seinfeld did. These clowns are saying no civilization for you because of this-or-that social problem.

ABC reported, “Activists splattered the glass-covered Mona Lisa painting with soup at the Louvre Museum in Paris on Sunday, according to the food-security group behind the protest.”

I have no doubt curators are in on these protests. The paintings are always protected by some transparent barrier, so the threat to damage is minuscule. In light of this theatrical occurence, Instapundit linked and old blogpost of mine. It was from November 18, 2022, “It is the painting they protest, not the oil.”

I re-read it. This Surber guy is good. Let me share it again because since I abandoned the blog over Google censorship, I have gained many more readers at Substack who likely never saw it.

* * *

The Guardian reported last month, “Just Stop Oil activists throw soup at Van Gogh’s Sunflowers.”

It was one of a series of such protests at art museums by people who say they oppose hydrocarbon fuels. Usually they just glue themselves to the frame of a famous work of art.

Art museums are an odd target for their activities. You could by some stretch of the imagination link their oil protest to oil paintings, I suppose. And it is attention grabbing.

But how many museum visitors are there? 

ART News interviewed Simon Bramwell, a cofounder of the Extinction Rebellion in Britain.

It asked him, “How did the idea to attach activists to paintings come about?”

He said, “I remember the shock when the Chinese dissident Ai Weiwei smashed that Ming era vase back in 1995. That was such an iconoclastic moment, and it was in a way a direct inspiration for these actions. We were asking: How do we cut through the noise, the endless back and forth of Tories and Labor, the school shootings? How do we do this in time and trying to wake people up to the fact that where we live is on fire?”

It was a headline-grabber, eh?

But why paintings by old white men?

Their audience is small.

The question seems to answer itself. In a totalitarian government, there is a practice called Year Zero in which the past is erased by the new regime. 

Mao did this with his Cultural Revolution in the 1960s. Mao Tse Tung replaced Confucius.

The Khmer Rouge created Year Zero when they took over Cambodia in 1975. 

The Taliban did this in Afghanistan in 2001, when months before 9/11, they destroyed the Bamiyan Buddhas created in the 6th century. Van Gogh’s work is a spring chicken in comparison to those 1,500-year-old towering icons.

We call this the cancel culture without realizing the accuracy of the phrase. The communists or whatever you wish to call the elitists and their brain-washed masses are turning the founding fathers of our constitutional republic into villains because that makes it easier to replace the God-given rights enumerated and protected by the Constitution with nonsense about the right to abortion and transgendering.

Perhaps there is a blowback.

The Daily Caller reported, "A leaked scene from the new film Tár went viral on social media on Thursday, largely as a result of the inherently anti-woke scripting from Todd Field.

“The scene shows leading lady Cate Blanchett’s character sitting at a piano with a young musician, seemingly in front of a class of students, as he completely misses whatever point she is trying to make about the power of music (or so one can assume without the full context of the storyline).

“‘Nowadays, white, male, cis composers, just not my thing,’ the young student says to her of Bach, one of the greatest and most famed composers of all time.

“‘Don’t be so eager to be offended,’ Blanchett’s character says back — not in a cruel or aggressive way, but seemingly as a way of pushing the young student to expand his mindset to accommodate Bach. ‘The narcissism of small differences leads to the most boring conformity.’

“As the scene goes on, the script calls out the hypocrisy and history of music as it relates to the modern woke cultural movement. ‘If Bach’s talent can be reduced to his gender, birth country, religion, sexuality and so on, then so can yours,’ Blanchett continues.”

* * *

The problem with her so-can-yours argument is that they are untalented. All they have is their gender, birth country, religion, sexuality and so on.

They seek entitlement because they have no merit. They can only destroy — with cans of soup.

As I said, it is not about oil. It is about the artwork. The oil is just an excuse to destroy. Hate Taylor Swift all you want, but she is talented and does not need to throw a tantrum and destroy things to get attention.

Which means her fellow lefties will someday destroy her work as well. It is what they do.