Social media fooled by crazily realistic AI photo of Katy Perry at 2024 Met Gala

The Met Gala pops up every year to with photos of the biggest celebrities in the world wearing all manner of weird and whacky outfits - but normally the stars in question are at least there.

This year, the event's dress code was Garden of Time, with floral notes absolutely everywhere.

One person who couldn't make the show, though, was apparently the singer Katy Perry - although you wouldn't know it if you glanced at her Instagram today.

Perry posted a couple of photos that look a heck of a lot like she's posing on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in a few different outfits.

In fact, though, as the post makes clear in a later image, they're both AI-generated - deliberate deepfakes of a sort, that make it look like Perry was there when she very much wasn't.

The first composition shows her in a dress with a huge bottom half, covered in flowers and with waist-length hair, while the second is more of a mermaid-style wet look, with a structural corset and pondweed skirt, and both look pretty fun.

They're not real, though, and we don't know whether they're based on actual designs that Perry intended to wear if she attended, or were completely made up by an AI generation prompt.

Either way, the third image in the post reveals the AI trick, in a funny way - screenshots of a text from Perry's own mother congratulating her on the first "gorgeous gown" and confessing she "didn't know you went to the Met".

Perry replies: "Lol mom the AI got you too, BEWARE!", revealing that she wasn't actually there at all, and her mom wasn't the only one - the post has countless comments from people who haven't realized they're fake.

Perry has tagged the location of her post as 'Metaverse' as a nod to the unreality of what she's talking about, and it's a pretty interesting reminder that you can't always trust what you see online nowadays.

The photos that she posted are, after all, very impressive for AI fakes, with only a few tiny clues they might not be what they seem.

While it's all well and good when someone generates photos of themself, meanwhile, it's still also a reminder that people can use this sort of tech about others, in ways that could be really easily misleading and harmful.

So, this might be a fun little bit of AI, but it's still part of a potentially worrying trend!