Even Katy Perry’s Mom Was Fooled by that AI Pic of Her at the Met Gala

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May 19, 2024

Fool Me Twice

Singer Katy Perry was apparently in the studio the night of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s annual gala — but if you were fooled by AI pics of her attending the event, you were in good company.

The “I Kissed A Girl” singer, born Kathryn Elizabeth Hudson, shared in an Instagram post two AI-generated photos of her wearing floral dresses that fit the Met Gala’s “Garden of Time” theme. In the same post, she also included a screenshot of a text exchange with her mother, who was apparently duped by one of the fake pictures into thinking her famous progeny was in attendance.

“Didn’t know you went to the Met,” the singer’s mother, Mary Hudson, said in the text screenshot. “What a gorgeous gown. You look like the Rose Parade, you are your own float lol.”

In response, the 39-year-old pop star quipped back: “the AI got you too, BEWARE!”

Katy Perry reveals her mom fell for an AI photo of her at the #MetGala. pic.twitter.com/ZVdCVmJbTw

— Pop Base (@PopBase) May 7, 2024

Fake 4 Fake

Perry’s response to being artificially placed at an event she didn’t attend was lighthearted, but it’s unclear if other celebs who were AI-faked onto the gala’s green carpet felt the same way.

An AI-manipulated photo of Lady Gaga, for instance, appeared to show her wearing a whimsical cylindrical gown adorned with floral arrangements. But as Harper’s Bazaar points out, the “Paparazzi” singer hasn’t attended the star-studded event since 2019. To make it even stranger, someone passed the same photo sans flowers off a day prior to the event itself, which makes it unclear how many rounds of AI image manipulation it went through.

@TheBravoDerm The AI is serving

— Patti Snyder (@PattiSnyderLMFT) May 7, 2024

Yet another fake photo appears to show Rihanna, considered alongside Gaga as one of the belles of the Met ball, in a similarly oversized floral gown. But as a community note on X-formerly-Twitter explains, the Bermudan singer was reportedly down with the flu during the event and couldn’t attend.

AI imagery falsely placing celebrities at the Met Gala is far from the worst abuse of the technology — but if one were to, say, create a convincing enough AI-generated image of a pop star attending a Satanic orgy, it’s not hard to imagine a certain subset of the population foaming at the mouth over it, even after it was revealed as a fake.

As 404 Media‘s Emanuel Maiberg so aptly put it when sharing his outlet’s write-up of the Met Gala debacle, “AI is boomer abuse” — and given that a manipulated image convinced someone’s own mother they were somewhere they weren’t, it’s hard to argue.

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