Men Using AI to “Spend a Day” With Sabrina Carpenter on TikTok Is Weird!
Sabrina Carpenter is back in the headlines this week, thanks to her music video for her newest single “House Tour.” But unfortunately, a video that she didn’t sign up for is also going viral.
A video from TikTok user @jameskamaraa has gotten millions of views on social media, in which he shows a “day in my life with Sabrina Carpenter.” The video uses a mix of real videos of himself doing mundane things — brushing his teeth, eating Domino’s pizza at 10am, sitting in his Tesla Cybertruck, and going for a walk — and AI-generated video clips of Carpenter. It also culminates, inexplicably, with him meeting Adam Sandler at an In-n-Out Burger, although it’s hard to tell if that footage is also AI-generated or not.
The video’s virality is, in large part, because fans of Carpenter are dunking on him, calling his actions “weird and disturbing” and genuinely “dangerous.” For one thing, the narrative he crafts around his “day” with Carpenter is annoyingly misogynistic: this fake version of her is silent, there to be ogled at, and content with a protein bar while he eats his mid-morning Domino’s. But the AI of it all makes it even more disturbing, and illustrates something that a lot of women have been worried about as the technology has gotten more commonplace in recent years.
Sure, the AI-generated clips of Carpenter are pretty brief and have limited range of movement. And her face and hair look more akin to the era of her first few albums and her time on the Disney Channel’s Girl Meets World, as opposed to her current aesthetic and facial features. But the fact that this AI-generated Carpenter doesn’t look completely in uncanny valley is a whole new level of horrifying: not just because of the amount of planet-killing resources needed to accomplish something like that, but because of its use to take away a woman’s agency and turn her into a silent and moldable object of men’s desire.
Why Do We Keep Doing This?!
That use of AI imagery has felt, for many, like an inevitability… especially because it’s not an isolated incident. In early 2024, Swift’s friend and fellow pop star Taylor Swift was at the center of another AI controversy, after disturbing AI-generated deepfake pornography of her began to spread on social media. It led to outcry from a number of groups, including SAG-AFTRA and the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (also known as RAINN), and even from the Biden administration and other politicians.
A bipartisan bill, which would give victims the right to sue people who create or own non-consensual “digital forgeries” of them, was introduced by the Senate soon after. Earlier this year, Missouri’s government also introduced the “Taylor Swift Act”, which outright criminalizes non-consensual deepfakes.
Unfortunately, even the mundane version of this “trend” isn’t even exclusive to Carpenter, as there are way too many TikToks of people using AI platforms to mock up photos of themselves with celebrities. Earlier this year, a fan was met with scrutiny for doing the same with Stranger Things star and Djo frontman Joe Keery, including in very intimate hypothetical scenarios involving a partner and a baby.
Not only do videos and posts like this cross countless lines about agency and consent… but it says a lot about the person who thought this was a totally reasonable thing to make. As @litraerii puts it: “men who need to do this to feel some sort of validation because women irl does not give two fucks about them and they probably haven’t felt a women’s touch in their life like maybe work on your miserable personality before you start imagining sabrina carpenter as your gf.”
(featured image: Sabrina Carpenter)
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