In early 2024, the British actor Joe Alwyn found himself at the centre of a distinctly modern form of harassment: AI-manipulated videos that fabricated intimate moments and arguments between him and his ex-partner Taylor Swift. The footage, which used doctored audio overlaid on real video clips of the former couple, spread across X (formerly Twitter) and TikTok in February 2024. One particularly viral clip altered the audio to make it sound as though Alwyn was arguing with Swift, with the fabricated line “You don’t get to tell me about sad” inserted into the exchange. Community notes on X flagged the audio as fake, yet the video had already been shared millions of times before corrections reached most viewers.
The incident arrived barely weeks after a far larger deepfake crisis involving Swift. In late January 2024, sexually explicit AI-generated images of the singer circulated on X, with one post accumulating more than 47 million views before the platform removed it. The images had been traced to a 4chan community that used generative AI tools to produce the content. X temporarily blocked all searches for “Taylor Swift” and related terms in an attempt to stem the spread, later stating it maintained a “zero-tolerance policy” towards non-consensual intimate imagery. The White House described the situation as “alarming,” and Microsoft subsequently tightened safety guardrails on its AI image-generation models.
A Relationship Under Relentless Scrutiny
Alwyn and Swift began dating in late 2016 and maintained one of the most guarded relationships in the entertainment industry for roughly six and a half years. The couple rarely made public appearances together and almost never discussed their relationship in interviews. Swift credited Alwyn as a co-writer on several tracks from her albums Folklore (2020) and Evermore (2020), where he was listed under the pseudonym William Bowery. He contributed to songs including “Exile,” “Betty,” and the title track “Evermore,” and won a Grammy as a co-producer on Folklore, which took Album of the Year at the 63rd Grammy Awards in March 2021.
Their breakup was publicly reported on 8 April 2023, with sources telling multiple outlets that the split had occurred “a few weeks” earlier and was described as “not dramatic” – a relationship that had “run its course.” In late March 2023, Swift had already removed the song “Invisible String,” widely interpreted by fans as being about Alwyn, from her Eras Tour setlist. Alwyn made his first public appearance following the news at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2023.
The deepfake videos that emerged in early 2024 weaponised their breakup, repackaging real footage with AI-fabricated audio to create narratives that portrayed Alwyn negatively. Fans and media critics identified the clips as part of what appeared to be a coordinated effort to damage his reputation in the aftermath of their separation. The deliberate targeting of a private individual through synthetic media underscored a growing problem that extends well beyond celebrity gossip. According to a 2023 report by the firm Sensity AI, 96 per cent of deepfake content online is non-consensual intimate imagery, and the vast majority targets women. Swift’s case brought an unprecedented level of mainstream attention to a crisis that had long been affecting ordinary people with far fewer resources to fight back, a dynamic explored in our coverage of the terrifying price of being Taylor Swift.
Alwyn Breaks His Silence
In June 2024, Alwyn spoke to The Sunday Times in what became his first major public remarks since the breakup. He described the experience of navigating the end of a long-term relationship under intense public scrutiny as “unusual and abnormal,” noting that the private matter had been rapidly “commodified” by the press and social media. “There is always going to be a gap between what is known and what is said,” he told the newspaper. “I have made peace with that.”
He followed up in January 2025 with an interview in The Guardian, published while he was promoting Brady Corbet’s critically acclaimed epic The Brutalist, in which Alwyn plays Harry Lee Van Buren, the entitled son of a wealthy industrialist portrayed by Guy Pearce. The film, which stars Adrien Brody as a Holocaust-surviving Hungarian architect who emigrates to America, premiered at the 81st Venice International Film Festival in September 2024. When The Guardian pressed Alwyn on the continued public fascination with his former relationship, he was characteristically measured: the relationship and its end were “a while ago now” in his life, and his focus remained on “friends, family, work.” In January 2025, he also made his first-ever American late-night television appearance on Late Night with Seth Meyers to promote the film.
Alwyn’s post-breakup career has been notably prolific. Beyond The Brutalist, he appeared in Yorgos Lanthimos’s Kinds of Kindness (2024) and is attached to upcoming productions including Hamnet (directed by Chloé Zhao), Hamlet (in which he will play Laertes, directed by Aneil Karia), and Panic Carefully, a thriller from Sam Esmail that pairs him with Julia Roberts. His trajectory is a reminder that, despite the media’s appetite for relationship narratives, Alwyn’s career as a serious actor – which began with Ang Lee’s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk in 2016 and continued through Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Favourite (2018) and the BBC adaptation of Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends (2022) – has always been the work he considers primary. Those interested in how the couple’s dynamic was perceived before the split may find our earlier piece on Taylor Swift and Joe Alwyn’s relationship a useful reference point.
The Legislative Response
The Taylor Swift deepfake crisis of January 2024 proved to be a legislative catalyst. Within weeks, a bipartisan group of US senators introduced the DEFIANCE Act (Disrupt Explicit Forged Images and Non-Consensual Edits), which was designed to allow victims of AI-generated non-consensual imagery to seek civil penalties against creators and distributors. Representative Joe Morelle simultaneously renewed his push for the Preventing Deepfakes of Intimate Images Act, which sought to make the sharing of digitally altered explicit images a federal crime. In Missouri, lawmakers proposed what became colloquially known as “The Taylor Swift Act,” providing civil remedies for victims of AI-generated sexual imagery at the state level.
These efforts culminated in the TAKE IT DOWN Act (Tools to Address Known Exploitation by Immobilizing Technological Deepfakes on Websites and Networks), introduced by Senators Ted Cruz and Amy Klobuchar on 16 January 2025. It passed the Senate by unanimous consent on 13 February 2025 and cleared the House of Representatives by a vote of 409 to 2 on 28 April 2025. President Trump signed it into law on 19 May 2025, making it one of the first major pieces of US federal legislation specifically targeting the harmful use of generative AI. The Act criminalises the knowing publication of non-consensual intimate imagery – including AI-generated deepfakes – and mandates that covered platforms remove flagged content within 48 hours. The Federal Trade Commission oversees the notice-and-removal provisions, while the Department of Justice enforces the criminal penalties.
The broader question of how artificial intelligence reshapes public life remains urgent, and the hazards extend far beyond celebrity image manipulation. Our analysis of when AI goes wrong examines related risks in other domains. For Alwyn, the lesson of the past two years appears to be one of quiet resilience: focus on what can be controlled, refuse to engage with what cannot, and let the work speak for itself.
