A video shows Taylor Swift saying the wildfires in Los Angeles were “divine retribution” for America funding missiles used in Gaza.
This isn’t a video of a real interview—it is altered footage from a 2021 television interview. Artificial Intelligence has likely been used to edit Ms Swift’s mouth to make it appear as if she is saying the fake audio.
A video clip of Taylor Swift supposedly saying the recent wildfires in Los Angeles are “divine retribution” for US military support for Israel does not show a real interview.
The video has been shared in the wake of the LA wildfires, which killed at least 28 people earlier this month.
The footage has been altered, and it is likely a deepfake lip-sync video. Deepfake content refers to original images, audio and videos created using artificial intelligence that can be used to convincingly imitate real people.
We’ve fact checked multiple lip-sync deepfake videos in the past, including one of the Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer that used a clip of him filmed by the Guardian to make it look like he was saying he thought some of the claims against the paedophile Jimmy Savile were “slightly frivolous”.
Misinformation spreads quickly online so it’s especially important to consider whether something is likely to be genuine before sharing.
We’ve written a guide on how to spot deepfake videos and AI audio which can help you identify content that has been edited or created to mislead online.
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The video shows Ms Swift speaking while glancing to her right and left, and features Arabic subtitles and a logo that resembles a news channel watermark.
Ms Swift appears to say: “Israel burns Gaza for a year and a half with missiles funded by American taxpayers, only for God’s punishment to strike the US in just two days.”
But Full Fact traced the original footage to an interview Ms Swift did in November 2021 on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, in which she discussed a recording of her song ‘All Too Well'. At no point did she mention Israel, Gaza or wildfires in the United States.
While the audio in the fake video bears some similarity to Ms Swift’s voice, the words are delivered in a robotic manner, with unnatural pauses and an unusual cadence, which suggests that it has been created using AI.
The movement of Ms Swift’s lips in the shared video often appears to match the words she is saying, but this has been changed from the original video, which is higher resolution, particularly around the mouth. Haziness around the lips and mouth area is a tell tale sign a video has been poorly lip synced.
As Dr Dominic Lees, an Associate Professor in Filmmaking and convenor of the University of Reading’s Synthetic Media Research Network, previously told us when analysing a different video, deepfakes “find it very difficult to generate a natural look in the teeth so often leave this blurry and out-of-focus”.
Full Fact has reached out to Ms Swift’s representative about the video, and will update this article if we receive a response.
This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as altered because this isn’t a video of a real interview—it has been altered, likely with AI.
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