AI Taylor Swift is mad. She is calling up Kim Kardashian to complain about her “lame excuse of a husband,” Kanye West. (Kardashian and West are, in reality, divorced.) She is threatening to skip Europe on her Eras Tour if her fans don’t stop asking her about international dates. She is insulting people who can’t afford tickets to her concerts and using an unusual amount of profanity. She’s being kind of rude.

But she can also be very sweet. She gives a vanilla pep talk: “If you are having a bad day, just know that you are loved. Don’t give up!” And she just loves the outfit you’re wearing to her concert.

She is also a fan creation. Based on tutorials posted to TikTok, many Swifities are using a program to create hyper-realistic sound bites using Swift’s voice and then circulating them on social media. The tool, the beta of which was launched in late January by ElevenLabs, offers “Instant Voice Cloning.” In effect, it allows you to upload an audio sample of a person’s voice and make it say whatever you want. It’s not perfect, but it’s pretty good. The audio has some tonal hitches here and there, but it tends to sound pretty natural—close enough to fool you if you aren’t paying enough attention. Dark corners of the internet immediately used it to make celebrities say abusive or racist things; ElevenLabs said in response that it “can trace back any generated audio to the user” and would consider adding more guardrails—such as manually verifying every submission.

Whether it’s done this is unclear. After I forked over $1 to try the technology myself—a discounted rate for the first month—my upload was approved nearly instantly. The slowest part of the process was finding a clear one-minute audio clip of Swift to use as a source for my custom AI voice. Once that was approved, I was able to use it to create fake audio right away. The entire process took less than five minutes. ElevenLabs declined to comment about its policies or the ability to use its technology to fake Taylor Swift’s voice, but it provided a link to its guidelines about voice cloning. The company told The New York Times earlier this month that it wants to create a “universal detection system” in collaboration with other AI developers.

The arrival of AI Taylor Swift feels like a teaser for what’s to come in a strange new era defined by synthetic media, when the boundaries between real and fake might blur into meaninglessness. For years, experts have warned that AI would lead us to a future of infinite misinformation. Now that world is here. But in spite of apocalyptic expectations, the Swift fandom is doing just fine (for now). AI Taylor shows us how human culture can evolve alongside more and more complex technology. Swifties, for the most part, don’t seem to be using the tool maliciously: They’re using it for play and to make jokes among themselves. Giving fans this tool is “like giving them a new kind of pencil or a paintbrush,” explains Andrea Acosta, a Ph.D. candidate at UCLA who studies K-pop and its fandom. They are exploring creative uses of the technology, and when someone seems to go too far, others in the community aren’t afraid to say so.  

[Read: Welcome to the big blur]

In some ways, fans might be uniquely well prepared for the fabricated future: They have been having conversations about the ethics of using real people in fan fiction for years. And although every fandom is different, researchers say these communities tend to have their own norms and be somewhat self-regulating. They can be some of the internet’s most diligent investigators. K-pop fans, Acosta told me, are so good at parsing what’s real and what’s fake that sometimes they manage to stop misinformation about their favorite artist from circulating. BTS fans, for example, have been known to call out factual inaccuracies in published articles on Twitter.  

The possibilities for fans hint at a lighter side of audio and video produced by generative AI. “There [are] a lot of fears—and a lot of them are very justified—about deepfakes and the way that AI is going to kind of play with our perceptions of what reality is,” Paul Booth, a professor at DePaul University who has studied fandoms and technology for two decades, told me. “These fans are kind of illustrating different elements of that, which is the playfulness of technology and the way that it can always be used in the kind of fun and maybe more engaging ways.”

But AI Taylor Swift’s viral spread on TikTok adds a wrinkle to these dynamics. It’s one thing to debate the ethics of so-called real-person fiction among fans in a siloed corner of the internet, but on such a large and algorithmically engineered platform, the content can instantly reach a huge audience. The Swifties playing with this technology share a knowledge base, but other viewers may not. “They know what she 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, the program director for the Center for Entertainment and Media Industries at the University of Texas at Austin, told me. “It’s when they leave that space that it becomes more concerning.”

Swifties on TikTok are already establishing norms regarding the voice AI, based at least in part on how Swift herself might feel about it. “If a bunch of people start saying, ‘Maybe this isn’t a good idea. It could be negatively affecting her,’” one 17-year-old TikTok Swiftie named Riley told me, “most people really just take that to heart.” Maggie Rossman, a professor at Bellarmine University who studies the Swift fandom, thinks that if Taylor were to come out against specific sound bites or certain uses of the AI voice, then “we’d see it shut down amongst a good part of the fandom.”

But this is challenging territory for artists. They don’t necessarily want to squash their fans’ creativity and the sense of community it builds—fan culture is good for business. In the new world, they’ll have to navigate the tension between allowing some remixing while maintaining ownership of their voice and reputation.

A representative for Swift did not respond to a request for comment on how she and her team are thinking about this technology, but fans are convinced that she’s listening. After her official TikTok account “liked” one video using the AI voice, a commenter exclaimed, “SHES HEARD THE AUDIO,” following up with three crying emoji.

TikTok, for its part, just released new community guidelines for synthetic media. “We welcome the creativity that new artificial intelligence (AI) and other digital technologies may unlock,” the guidelines say. “However, AI can make it more difficult to distinguish between fact and fiction, carrying both societal and individual risks.” The platform does not allow AI re-creations of private people, but gives “more latitude” for public figures—so long as the media is identified as being AI-generated and adheres to the company’s other content policies, including those about misinformation.

But boundary-pushing Swift fans can probably cause only so much harm. They might destroy Ticketmaster, sure, but they’re unlikely to bring about AI armageddon. Booth thinks about all of this in terms of “degrees of worry.”

“My worry for fandom is, like, Oh, people are going to be confused and upset, and it may cause stress,” he said. “My worry with [an AI fabrication of President Joe] Biden is, like, It might cause a nuclear apocalypse.”

Close to 5 million people follow Influencers in the Wild. The popular Instagram account makes fun of the work that goes into having a certain other kind of popular Instagram account: A typical post catches a woman (and usually, her butt) posing for photos in public, often surrounded by people but usually operating in total ignorance or disregard of them. In the comments, viewers—aghast at the goofiness and self-obsession on display—like to say that it’s time for a proverbial asteroid to come and deliver the Earth to its proverbial fiery end.

Influencers in the Wild has been turned into a board game with the tagline “Go places. Gain followers. Get famous. (no talent required)” And you get it because social-media influencers have always been, to some degree, a cultural joke. They get paid to post photos of themselves and to share their lives, which is something most of us do for free. It’s not real work.

But it is, actually. Influencers and other content creators are vital assets for social-media companies such as Instagram, which has courted them with juicy cuts of ad revenue in a bid to stay relevant, and TikTok, which flew some of its most famous creators out to D.C. last week to lobby for its very existence. In some ways, their work makes them the peers of those in the broader platform-based gig economy, which includes anybody else whose income is dependent on an app—Uber drivers, DoorDash bikers, TaskRabbit handymen, etc. But though some categories of workers whose jobs are similarly reliant on apps have been able, to an extent, to get around their lack of official employee status and put direct pressure on tech companies to improve their working conditions, content creators so far have not. (Of course, the work is very different: Deliveries and car rides happen in physical space, with the attendant occupational hazards, and influencers have a lot more individual control over how they monetize themselves across platforms.)

Instead, online creators are facing a kind of existential crisis. They have never been more valuable to their home platforms, yet they’re still struggling to turn that value into meaningful leverage. For years now, the wide middle range of creators—the people who can make some money on social media, even if they have not attained superstardom—have complained about product changes, opaque algorithms with shifting priorities, and arbitrary content-moderation decisions that limit their reach. Will the relationship between influencers and the internet ever change?

Some in the industry are determined to prove that it could. They’re trying, not for the first time, to organize an incredibly diffuse group of individual personalities. And the attempt is, also not for the first time, going up against stark odds. This industry is all about the establishment and marketing of personal brands in unforgiving feeds—it would seem to forbid worker solidarity. But it is also at a crucial turning point. After more than 10 years of instability, clout-chasing, and competition, something has to give. As a creator, your market value is set by your metrics—but there could be greater strength in a different kind of number.

[Read: The internet, but for hot people]

Some influencers even think they should unionize. TikTok creators started discussing the possibility last fall, and Emily Hund, a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania who has studied the online creator economy since its beginning, explicitly advocates for unionization in her new book, The Influencer Industry: The Quest for Authenticity on Social Media.

Creators must “recognize themselves as the cultural laborers they are and organize accordingly,” Hund writes. She contextualizes the rise of influencers and the beginning of the social-media age in the aftermath of the 2008 recession, the cratering of traditional media, and the beginnings of the platform-based gig economy. As certain kinds of stable and reliable work disappeared for many, making money on social media became a viable alternative. “The influencer industry is both a symptom of and a response to the economic precarity and upheaval in social institutions that have characterized the early twenty-first century,” she writes.

To describe the type of work that influencers do, she draws on a range of academic papers that have proposed similar concepts such as “aspirational labor” and “visibility labor.” “Risk is shouldered by the individual,” she writes, “self-promotional, always-on work styles are the norm; labor is oriented toward nebulous future payouts; and inequalities of gender, race, and class persist.” The work is hyper-personal and amorphous, which makes it an awkward fit with the ranking and quantification that take place on a huge platform like Instagram or YouTube.

With these issues in mind, a TikTok creator who goes by JeGaysus is currently part of the effort to organize a TikTok union around pay and transparency issues. (He asked to be identified by his username because he’s previously received online threats.) So far, the group has about 400 interested people in an active Discord chat. “It’s kind of hard to say what revenue creators should have because it’s a closed book,” he told me. He said creators are frustrated because they have no recourse—they can’t call TikTok when they have a problem. “They have that email, legal@tiktok.com,” he said, “ but you can write to it and you’re never going to hear from them.” (TikTok did not return a request for comment, and hasn’t previously addressed the possibility of a union directly. “We look to our creator community for valuable feedback and continue to listen as we work to evolve our offerings to better serve their needs,” a spokesperson told Business Insider when asked about the would-be union last year.)

Although this would-be union is focused on the relationship between creators and the platform, influencers have also been incorporated into Hollywood’s Screen Actors Guild. Some creators have been hesitant to join, wary of things like union dues and eligibility requirements, but others have been enthusiastic. Anybody who makes videos for brands can use the guild’s “influencer agreement” to put their deals under the purview of the union. “Not a single day goes by, Monday through Friday, in which I’m not speaking to an influencer who isn’t yet a SAG-AFTRA member about covering their brand deals through our Influencer Agreement,” Shaine Griffin, the guild’s manager of contract strategic initiatives, told me. (SAG-AFTRA declined to say how many influencers had joined the union; Giselle Ugarte, a TikTok creator and talent manager, told me that she didn’t know anyone who had.)

In the past, when posters have flirted with unionization, it hasn’t been very successful or even particularly literal. In 2019, Instagram-meme creators received press attention for forming a sort of union, which they called “IG Meme Union Local 69-420.” Their Instagram account posted union flyers (a raised fist gripping a smartphone) playing off of retro aesthetics and adding modern messages such as “Smash the algorithm.” (One riffed on the then-popular “I’m baby” meme with the phrase “Alone we am baby but together we am united.”) The short-lived “union” wasn’t really a union, though—it was more like a club or a thought experiment. It was mostly interested in getting people’s deleted posts or accounts reinstated by the platform, and its goals didn’t have anything to do with pay.

A more serious previous effort, the Internet Creators Guild, was started by the popular YouTuber Hank Green in 2016, primarily with the intention of helping creators protect themselves in the “cut-throat” world of brand deals and confusing contract language. Green’s group met with YouTube to discuss its ever-changing monetization policies, but Satchell Drakes, a YouTuber and former member of the guild’s board, told me that nothing really came out of the relationship. (“The free catering was always good though,” he joked.) The Guild shut down after three years, citing a lack of interest particularly among the already successful. “Creators with big audiences often don’t feel the need for support from a collective voice,” a farewell letter noted.

[Read: The GIF is on its deathbed ]

In this way, not much has changed in the past few years. It’s still the case that the biggest influencers have nothing much to gain from joining forces with those below them. They have their own agents, managers, entertainment lawyers, and leverage. “They are small businesses on their own and they don’t need help from others,” Jon Pfeiffer, a Los Angeles–based lawyer who represents online creators, told me. “It’s only if you’re starting out or you’re a micro-influencer that you want to band together for strength in numbers.” He started representing influencers in 2015—mostly taking on clients in the 1-to-5-million-follower range—and said “not one client” has ever asked him about an industry association or other groups they could join.

In short, the recent history of influencer coordination has not been a series of victories. Even so, these efforts are emblematic of something: Influencers tend to care and complain about the same issues, and have for years. They’ve started to make modest progress with the public. Popular understanding of concepts like the “attention economy” have given them and their followers some language to express how performance translates into value for platforms. And they are beginning to test boundaries by experimenting, for example, with strikes of a sort.

In the summer of 2021, Black content creators on TikTok organized a protest against the pattern of white creators profiting off of dances choreographed by Black performers. They agreed to announce publicly that they would not be coming up with a new viral dance to go with the latest Megan Thee Stallion single. But as the New York Times story about the strike noted, as the industry is currently set up, if a creator doesn’t post new content for a day or a week, TikTok isn’t the party that’s going to be hurt by it. Only the individuals who give up views and their spot in the mysterious algorithmic ranking would be making a sacrifice. “That was obviously the most successful ‘strike’ in the space so far because they were able to gain a lot of visibility,” Hund told me. “But many individuals had very valid reasons for not participating and I think before there can be a more meaningful strike, there has to be more meaningful solidarity building amongst the influencers.”

When I spoke with JeGaysus about this, he said he wasn’t sure if a true TikTok strike would ever be possible. Even if his proposed union were able to persuade 10,000 creators to not post for some amount of time, the platform wouldn’t feel much of anything. “As soon as those 10,000 accounts step away for a week, there’s another 40,000 accounts making videos,” he said. “Even if you had Charli D’Amelio, there’s 5,000 other 18-year-old girls who are going to be doing a dance trend.”

What content makers require is a cultural shift, Drakes, the YouTuber, argues. This has already started—platform ad-revenue sharing is now a norm, while at one point the idea of creators being paid directly by social-media platforms was seen as ridiculous. But he’s still waiting for a crucial last step: for creators to be seen as workers and for them to see one another that way. That has to happen before the average person will identify content creation as work. “I think it’s really easy to draw an analogue between a cab driver and an Uber driver,” he said. “It’s a little bit harder for people to conceptualize their friend making YouTube videos as the same thing as a late-night-show host—and in many ways it’s not, but the protections should be similar.”

This type of labor may be looked down upon simply because everyone who uses these platforms is subject to the same flood of data. Maybe you’ve fretted over the number of likes you’ve received on an Instagram post; a professional influencer might do the same thing, though their concern comes from a different place. You’re being vain; they’re worrying about their livelihood. “People still roll their eyes at the influencer, creator economy,” Ugarte, the TikTok-talent manager, told me. But maybe that’s just a phase.

We can’t seem to escape his dark shadow.

Donald Trump has added another shameful chapter in the life of this nation. On Thursday he became the first ex-president to be indicted, by a New York grand jury investigating alleged hush-money payments to a porn star.

The wisdom of the indictment depends in large part on the facts of the case, which right now we know very little about. Is this a selective prosecution, which would be a grave injustice, or is the evidence in this case strong and the indictment, if made against a Donald Jones rather than Donald Trump, defensible? We’ll learn more about the answers to these questions in the days and weeks and months ahead.

If the full ramifications of the indictment are impossible to know at this point, there are some things we can count on. One of them is that in the short term, the indictment will inflame our politics, further outrage the former president’s supporters, and create in them an even greater sense of grievance and vengeance. This will become their rallying cry; Trump will become their martyr.

Republicans will vow payback. Believing that the law has been weaponized against them, they will promise to weaponize it against Democrats. Our politics, already brutal and savage, will get more brutal and more savage still.

As unfortunate as this is, it may be the cost of accountability, something Trump has avoided his entire life. It has long been a source of pride for Americans to say that no person is above the law. And while that’s never been quite true, that aspiration is admirable, a kind of north star to guide our justice system.

If we ever get to the point where efforts to intimidate prosecutors and judges keep justice from being done—where threats of violence, promises of revenge, or mob rule influences the outcome of legal cases—we will have started down the path of lawlessness. Trump has acted like a mob boss in this case, and through much of his life. It’s important that he not avoid being brought to justice just because of his thuggish tactics.

“Whether the indictment is warranted or not, it crosses a huge line in American politics and American legal history,” Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard Law professor and former top Justice Department official under President George W. Bush, told The New York Times. And more are likely to follow. Of the four potential cases against Trump—including a Fulton County, Georgia, investigation of election subversion; a federal probe of presidential documents at Mar-a-Lago; and a federal inquiry into incitement on January 6—this is generally regarded as the weakest. Which tells us something important.

Donald Trump obsessively portrays himself as a victim; in fact, he is a man of borderless corruption. It has touched seemingly every area of his life. That would be bad enough, but as president, he did inestimable damage to the country, up to and including inspiring a violent insurrection and attempting to overturn an election. Now that some measure of accountability may have arrived for the least of his offenses, he will rage and storm, sensing that the long-delayed reckoning for his other misdeeds may also be at hand.

In his statement responding to the indictment, the former president said, “Never before in our Nation’s history has this been done.” But never before in our nation’s history have we had a president as dishonorable, as unethical, and as malicious as Donald Trump.

The whirligig of time brings in his revenges.

The first Catholic. The first African American. Someday, maybe soon, the first woman. The history of the presidency is a history of firsts. Now there is one more: the first former president to be indicted.

It’s a solemn and sad moment. It’s also a fiercely just moment.

Remember that although Donald Trump’s indictment in New York has been confirmed by one of his attorneys, we do not yet know, as of the evening of Thursday, March 30, what he has been indicted for. When Trump himself circulated the first rumors of his pending indictment, many reacted with rapid comments on the inadvisability of indicting a former president for offenses arising from a sexual affair, a reservation I share. But it’s also possible that this reported indictment arises from the Trump Organization’s decades-long practices of criminal tax fraud.

[David Frum: Trump’s reckoning with the rule of law]

In 2018, The New York Times reported that the Trump family had allegedly evaded hundreds of millions of dollars in estate taxes through complex schemes of false invoicing. In 2022, a New York State court convicted the Trump Organization of evading income taxes through false invoicing. When it came time to pay off women who claimed to have had sexual connections with Trump, he allegedly reverted to long-standing practice.

This is how the Trump case might diverge from that of John Edwards, the former Democratic presidential candidate charged with diverting campaign funds to a former lover. The case against Trump might not be a sex-payoff case, or even a campaign-finance case. It could fundamentally be a tax-fraud case, the latest installment of a multigenerational criminal practice that has cheated the people of the United States and New York of huge amounts of money.

More indictments by more states in more cases may be filed soon. Donald Trump is not an occasional lawbreaker. He incited the mob that ended the American tradition of the peaceful transfer of power—and that inflicted unnecessary injury and avoidable death both upon law-enforcement officers and Trump’s own deceived supporters. He tried to intimidate state-level election officials to manipulate vote totals to fraudulently preserve his hold on office. The jeopardy will only accumulate.

[David Frum: Justice is coming for Donald Trump]

Trump may regard the present indictment and those to come as a political resource. He has surged in Republican polls since he announced the indictment was on its way. His leading party rival has deflated in the polls. Trump has raised millions of dollars on the news, and may in the next hours raise many more. There’s no denying that he’s now the overwhelming favorite to be the next Republican nominee, and therefore stands an excellent chance of winning the presidency in 2024.

Atop all the other questions on the ballot in that election, therefore, will be this: Crime and violence and Trump, or law and the Constitution—where do you stand?

Good God, where does his Republican Party and mine now stand? The wrong is overwhelming and the shame is crushing—but the only decent choice for the honest and patriotic American is now starker, purer, and more certain than ever.