On Thursday, Taylor Swift did something very Taylor Swift: She posted an Instagram Story with a link to purchase “Fortnight,” the first single from her new album. The Department of Tortured Poets. It was nice, maybe even unnecessary. Taylor Swift is one of the biggest recording artists in the world. she announced TTPD in February when accepting the Grammy for best pop vocal album for his latest album, midnight. Swift sold 19 million albums in the United States alone last year; she doesn’t have to post IG stories about a new single. Yet, there she was making the Internet go frothy like it was 1989.
However, as he posted, something else stirred up his huge fan base: The Department of Tortured Poets leaked, supposedly spreading thanks to a Google Drive link that circulated online. (Piracy is backbaby!) Almost immediately, there were two camps: one saying true fans I would wait until the official release of the album, Friday at midnight. The other couldn’t wait and pressed Play anyway. Among that last group was a subcamp: people who thought the leak (or at least part of it) was a product of artificial intelligence.
Claims of “It has to be AI“come from various corners, but many seem to emerge from one line in particular, on the album’s title track, in which (alleged) Swift sings: “You smoked and then you ate seven bars of chocolate/We declare that Charlie Puth should be a bigger artist.” “(The rumor is speculating is a line about her ex, Matty Healy). The audio has since been removed for copyright violation, but when a user posted that fragment online, the suggestions that he was generated by AI followed quickly.
Upon the album’s release, everyone knew that the song was, in fact, real. They also learned that the songs that had been circulating before the album’s release were only part of the package. Fast returned to Instagram at 2 a.m. on Friday to announce that it was actually a “DOUBLE secret album”—The department of tortured poets: the anthology—31 songs in total. But the “it must be AI” reaction remains complex.
Online life is flooded with AI-generated fakes. Just a few years after the LLM revolution, the need not to believe what one’s lying eyes see is a fact. The same goes for your lying ears. The biggest problem is that while skepticism and fact-checking are generally always a good idea when obtaining information online, AI has become so prevalent that it can also be a cop-out. Don’t you like what your honest eyes see? Convince yourself that it is AI.
What makes all of this even more complicated is that AI is progressing to the point where composing something like “The Department of Tortured Poets” doesn’t seem too far out of its realm of possibility. An AI version of Johnny Cash has already covered Swift’s “Blank Space.” “Heart on My Sleeve,” an AI-generated song from 2023 that sounded strikingly similar to one actually made by Drake and the Weeknd, was close enough to the real thing that some people thought it might be a promotional ploy.