Shameless Scammers Are Cashing in by Posting Fake, AI-Altered Paparazzi Shots of Celebrities Undergoing Going Huge Body Changes, Drinking While Pregnant, and Cheating on Their Partners
Futurism ·
Tabloid content has somehow become even worse — and people are falling for it. The post Shameless Scammers Are Cashing in by Posting Fake, AI-Altered Paparazzi Shots of Celebrities Undergoing Going Huge Body Changes, Drinking While Pregnant, and Cheating on Their Partners appeared first on Futurism .
In one synthetic image published to X-formerly-Twitter, the singer Billie Eilish looks terrifyingly thin. In another, the model and reality TV star Kendall Jenner is pictured heavily pregnant as she carries a bottle of liquor. In yet another, the rapper Jaden Smith holds and kisses a “mystery man.” All of the images are AI-altered deepfakes — and they’re picking up traction on platforms like X, which engage in little moderation and are deeply integrated with AI tech.
Welcome to the new era of viral AI tabloid fodder, delivered straight from the uncanny valley and completely unburdened from the confines of reality.
Engagement baiters on X are spreading fabricated and often sensational clickbait about famous people by way of deepfaked paparazzi shots and social media posts, editing existing images to alter celebrities’ bodies and surroundings to suit concocted narratives. The images can be alarmingly convincing due to the fact that they’re slightly-altered versions of real images, rather than AI-generated whole cloth, meaning that much of the original picture remains intact.
The motive, it seems, is money: the accounts publishing this kind of content tend to be verified, meaning that they stand to get a financial kickback from X if their content goes viral, as in the case of deepfaked images claiming to show billionaire Jeff Bezos with a hair transplant.
The posts are farcically shameless. One prolific account, which currently goes by the handle “Prince Uk,” published a pair of images on November 2 depicting the singer Miley Cyrus — a frequent target of these posters — looking unhealthily skinny, claiming that her ill appearance was the result of her “divorce from Liam Hemsworth.”
“Some broken bonds change you forever, and it shows,” Prince Uk editorialized. (In the real photos that were modified for the exploitative posts, Cyrus looks completely normal.)
Just days later, on November 9, the same account published more images of Cyrus. This time, though, she was several sizes larger. A reverse-image search shows that the original photo is actually a paparazzi picture of the writer and actress Lena Dunham altered to replace Dunham’s face with Cyrus’.
“How did her body change this fast?” Prince Uk wondered in the image’s caption.
We found numerous accounts posting similar images in which celebrities’ bodies have been altered to appear larger or smaller, or to lie that a given famous person has had a body-transforming surgery such as a Brazilian butt lift, or “BBL.” Among the celebrities who have been targeted are Addison Rae Easterling, Jenna Ortega, Camila Cabello, Kylie Jenner, Ariana Grande, and even famously muscular action stars like Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, John Cena, and Jason Statham.
As with the claims about Cyrus, the manipulated images are often paired with a sensational story about why a celeb’s body has transformed, speculating based on the fake images that a star must be ill, struggling amid a breakup, or perhaps on drugs.
“Billie Eilish was spotted smoking and looking extremely malnourished just weeks after her split from Nat Wolff, amid reports that she’s struggling to cope with the breakup, which was triggered by her breast reduction surgery,” reads the completely ridiculous caption of a deepfake post shared by an account that currently goes by the name “BUSTED [troll emoji].”
In the edited images, Eilish is depicted as scarily skinny, and the deepfaker has even replaced the water bottle in her hands in the real photos from that day with a cigarette.
Faux pregnancy content is also a common tactic of the engagement-seeking posters. Kendall Jenner has been a repeat target of this kind of content, as has Cyrus and Hailey Bieber, among other famous women. Some of these posts are outfitted with salacious claims about infidelity or pregnancy post-breakup, or show stars who have been edited to look pregnant clutching bottles of alcohol. Particularly appalling posts even claim to have knowledge of a celebrity’s alleged miscarriages.
Yet more deepfaked posts claim to show proof that celebrities are transitioning genders, for example depicting the singer Sam Smith with breasts. Another post claimed to show the actress Mia Goth looking barefoot and “homeless” — while the original photos show that Goth was clearly wearing shoes .
One common genre of celebrity deepfake slop is imagery of celebrity couples altered to make it look as if one partner is cheating with another person. Several accounts have posted images of actor Jacob Elordi with a roster of women who aren’t his girlfriend, Kendall Jenner, with one poster called “Tee” even going as far as to show Elordi in the embrace of Kim Kardashian, Jenner’s sister. Another post shared by Prince Uk claims to show Cyrus “kissing a mystery woman in Miami,” but the real photos show Cyrus canoodling on a sidewalk with Maxx Morando, her real-world fiancé. Incredibly, the images’ creator didn’t even change Morando’s outfit — meaning that the fake “mystery woman” not only apparently stole Cyrus’ boyfriend, but took his clothes, too.
While some of the images are completely ridiculous, others are egregiously dark. One deepfaked image, for example, was edited to show Shiloh Jolie, the 20-year-old daughter of Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt, holding a bottle of liquor and crying. The caption suggests that Shiloh’s behavior is the result of poor parenting. This image, however, is fabricated.
Elsewhere, posters have even gone as far as to alter photos of minor children of celebrities, for example sharing a synthetic image of 14-year-old Blue Ivy Carter — the daughter of Beyoncé and Shawn “Jay-Z” Carter — smoking a cigarette. In the real image, there are no cigarettes in sight.
Many of the accounts posting the deepfakes are based in Africa, frequently Nigeria, according to account information on X, despite some of the posters claiming on their profiles to be based in the US. The accounts are verified, allowing for the use of X’s monetization tools. While reviewing the content, we also noticed that many of the same accounts were consistently commenting on each others’ digitally-altered images, a tactic that suggests a coordinated effort and which may be geared at boosting each post’s chance of virality.
We reached out to several accounts publishing the deepfakes, but haven’t heard back. In one case, a poster going by “Hisom” deleted a post containing images we’d flagged as an example of deepfake content. (The image had been altered to show music producer Benny Blanco with hickeys on his neck.)
X didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Ridiculous tabloid fodder running the spectrum from bizarre to destructive and outright abusive is far from new. These synthetically-altered images, however, represent a new online world of celebrity clickbait that, remarkably, manages to lower a bar that was already at rock-bottom. Now, those wishing to earn a few bucks by peddling nonsense can simply DIY reality with the few clicks of a button and disseminate it to the masses — throwing noxious spaghetti at the wall until they find what sticks.
More on celebrity deepfakes: Creeps Are Using AI to Undress Celebrities in Paparazzi Shots for Clicks
The post Shameless Scammers Are Cashing in by Posting Fake, AI-Altered Paparazzi Shots of Celebrities Undergoing Going Huge Body Changes, Drinking While Pregnant, and Cheating on Their Partners appeared first on Futurism .