When the Red Carpet Gets Photoshopped Into Oblivion
Every year, the Met Gala takes over the internet for a night — dazzling looks, wild outfits, and a flood of social media posts from fans around the world. But this year, not everything you saw was real.
As celebrities like Nicki Minaj and Lady Gaga made their way up the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, a parallel stream of AI-generated photos and videos began circulating online — some convincing enough to fool casual scrollers.
CBC Arts stepped in with a fact-check to help Canadians sort out which images were authentic and which had been generated by artificial intelligence.
The Problem With AI at Live Events
The Met Gala presents a particularly tricky case for AI misinformation. It's a high-anticipation event where fans are hungry for content before official photos drop, and the elaborate, fantastical fashion on display makes AI-generated images harder to spot — because real Met Gala looks already push the boundaries of believable.
AI image generators have become sophisticated enough to produce hyper-realistic celebrity likenesses in detailed settings. That creates a window during live events where fake content can spread widely before fact-checkers or the celebrities themselves can respond.
Nicki Minaj and Lady Gaga were among the stars whose likenesses appeared in circulating fake images and videos — though neither was responsible for the content.
How to Spot an AI-Generated Photo
For Canadians navigating a social media feed full of Met Gala content, a few red flags can help identify AI fakes:
- Unnatural hands and fingers — AI models still struggle with rendering realistic hands
- Odd background details — Crowds, text, and architectural elements often look blurred or warped
- Lighting inconsistencies — Shadows that don't match the light source, or skin that looks unnaturally smooth
- Too-perfect symmetry — Real photos have subtle imperfections; AI images can look eerily flawless
- No credible source — If an image is only circulating on fan accounts with no press attribution, treat it skeptically
When in doubt, reverse image search tools and CBC's own fact-checking coverage can help trace where an image originated.
Why This Matters Beyond Celebrity Gossip
The spread of AI fakes during the Met Gala might seem trivial — it's fashion and celebrity culture, after all. But it reflects a much larger challenge Canadians will increasingly face: a media environment where images can no longer be taken at face value.
The same technology being used to put fake gowns on pop stars is being used in political misinformation campaigns, scam advertisements, and deepfake fraud. Building habits of visual skepticism now — even around low-stakes events like a red carpet — is good practice for the higher-stakes situations ahead.
CBC's ongoing fact-checking work is part of a broader effort by Canadian media to help audiences develop critical digital literacy skills at a time when they're needed more than ever.
Source: CBC Arts — Fact check: Nicki Minaj, Lady Gaga and other fake Met Gala photos
