Kim Kardashian attends The 2024 Met Gala Celebrating “Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion” at The … [+]
Photos of stars in elaborate outfits from the 2024 Met Gala blended seamlessly with AI-generated images posted online, as fake versions of Katy Perry, Rihanna, Lady Gaga and Kim Kardashian spread through social media.
While some AI-generated fakes were more obvious than others, many commentators and influencers assumed they were looking at real outfits—Katy Perry’s own mother was fooled by an AI-generated image of her daughter.
The theme of this year’s Met Gala was “Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion,” which refers to the garments on display, many of which are too fragile to hang; instead, they lie inside glass cases, like Sleeping Beauty.
The dress code was “The Garden of Time,” a 1962 dystopian short story by JG Ballard that proved thematically resonant for the occasion. Ballard’s story tells of an isolated, magnificent sanctuary that is on the brink of invasion by a destructive mob.
The garden of the estate is tended to by Count Axel and his Countess wife, who are powerless to stop the invasion, but can delay the inevitable by plucking the crystal “time flowers” that sprout in the oasis.
There are a limited number of these flowers, and the garden is doomed to be overwhelmed by the mob, eventually—it’s just a matter of time.
Met Gala attendees took inspiration from the story’s themes of impermanence, decay and rebirth, the event providing a visual feast of ethereal outfits that invoked the beauty of nature.
Tyla attends The 2024 Met Gala Celebrating “Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion” at The … [+]
South African singer Tyla wore an outfit that perfectly captured the theme, a dress made of sand that was designed to be impermanent, and was even cut off during the event, after Tyla had immortalized the dress in photographs.
In an ironic twist, the metaphor of Ballard’s The Garden of Time also seems apt for the current state of the internet, a digital oasis cultivated by human interaction, now threatened by a deluge of AI-generated content that erodes the line between artifice and reality.
On X (Twitter), pictures of Katy Perry, Lady Gaga and Rihanna at the Met Gala flooded the timeline, despite none of them having attended the event.
While the pictures were eventually flagged as fakes and labeled with community notes, some of the posts received thousands of likes, shares and views.
Most of the images are impressively true to life, and the speed of scrolling culture is well-suited to allow for the casual flow of misinformation.
The proliferation of AI-generated images on Facebook is well-documented, and has resulted in some surreal tropes to emerge, such as “Shrimp Jesus.” Generally, other social media sites have proved more resistant to the AI-generated flood.
However, many users on X and TikTok were fooled by the fake Met Gala posts; one TikTok influencer even gave a positive review of an AI-generated dress that Kim Kardashian never wore (Kardashian did attend the event in a different outfit).
The photos from the Met Gala were already somewhat surreal, and the image-generators proved apt at mimicking the floral gowns and experimental pieces worn by real attendees.
The sight of distorted photographers in the background of the AI fakes, some aiming their cameras at the floor, added to the otherworldly tone of the evening.
Some commentators expressed concern that the wave of AI-generated Met Gala images were an ominous sign that the technology would soon be used to spread political misinformation.
Clearly, the metaphorical power of Ballard’s story still resonates. Ballard’s insight went beyond fiction, with the writer seemingly predicting our social media future in a 1977 essay written for Vogue. Ballard wrote:
“Every one of our actions during the day, across the entire spectrum of domestic life, will be instantly recorded on video-tape. In the evening we will sit back to scan the rushes, selected by a computer trained to pick out only our best profiles, our wittiest dialogue, our most affecting expressions filmed through the kindest filters, and then stitch these together into a heightened re-enactment of the day.”
Ballard’s prescient predictions, however, couldn’t foresee the rise of generative AI, and the strange complications that follow.
One Community. Many Voices. Create a free account to share your thoughts.
Our community is about connecting people through open and thoughtful conversations. We want our readers to share their views and exchange ideas and facts in a safe space.
In order to do so, please follow the posting rules in our site’s Terms of Service. We’ve summarized some of those key rules below. Simply put, keep it civil.
Your post will be rejected if we notice that it seems to contain:
User accounts will be blocked if we notice or believe that users are engaged in:
So, how can you be a power user?
Thanks for reading our community guidelines. Please read the full list of posting rules found in our site’s Terms of Service.
