WASHINGTON, United States (AFP) — Donald Trump shared doctored images showing Taylor Swift and her fans supporting his presidential campaign, in an apparent effort to tap into the pop singer’s mega star power in the US election.

Swift has not yet publicly thrown her weight behind any presidential candidate in the 5 November election, but she backed President Joe Biden in 2020 and has previously been critical of Trump.

On Sunday, Trump shared screenshots of posts with manipulated images — including some that an expert said appeared to be artificial intelligence (AI)-generated — suggesting that the pop star and her fans, popularly known as Swifties, support his campaign.

In a post on his social media site Truth Social, which included an image of Swift clad in an Uncle Sam outfit and instructing her fans to vote for Trump, the former president wrote: “I accept!”

That image, in the style of a poster, was either “AI-generated or just classically manipulated,” Hany Farid, a digital forensics expert at the University of California, Berkeley, told Agence France-Presse.

The post also includes photos of women wearing shirts with the slogan “Swifties for Trump,” some of which Farid said had the “tell-tale signs of being AI-generated.”