Description: Purported AI-generated images depicting Katy Perry attending the 2024 Met Gala circulated widely on social media, leading to public confusion about her presence at the event. The images were realistic enough to deceive fans and even Perry’s mother, who believed them to be authentic. Perry publicly clarified the images were fake, attributing them to AI and noting she had missed the event due to work.
Editor Notes: This incident is part of a pair of purported AI-generated celebrity impersonation cases involving Katy Perry at the 2024 and 2025 Met Gala events. In both cases, reportedly realistic deepfake images depicting Perry on the red carpet circulated widely on social media, which is described as having led to sustained public confusion about her attendance. Reportedly, in 2024, Perry's mother was also misled by the images, and in 2025, Perry publicly addressed the recurrence of the phenomenon. Although no financial harm, defamation, or malicious actor attribution has been confirmed, these incidents are included in the database as examples of epistemic distortion within which synthetic media causes widespread misrecognition without seeming to deceive for material gain or institutional impact. Their documentation is meant to preserve a record of overt cultural epistemic distortion, especially as public trust in photographic evidence continues to erode. See Incident 1059.
Entities
View all entitiesAlleged: Unknown deepfake technology developer developed an AI system deployed by unknown, which harmed Truth , Katy Perry , General public and Fans of Katy Perry.
Alleged implicated AI system: Unknown deepfake technology developer
Incident Stats
Incident ID
1058
Report Count
1
Incident Date
2024-05-06
Editors
Daniel Atherton
Incident Reports
Reports Timeline
Katy Perry may not have made it to the 2024 Met Gala --- but her mom didn't get the memo!
The singer and American Idol judge, 39, was the unwitting victim of AI on May 6 when someone created an image of "her" at the Met Gala --- except it w…
Variants
A "variant" is an incident that shares the same causative factors, produces similar harms, and involves the same intelligent systems as a known AI incident. Rather than index variants as entirely separate incidents, we list variations of incidents under the first similar incident submitted to the database. Unlike other submission types to the incident database, variants are not required to have reporting in evidence external to the Incident Database. Learn more from the research paper.
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