Emma Madden is a British journalist based in Los Angeles. Their work has appeared in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and New York magazine.
The images out of the Met Gala this year were positively intergalactic. Keira Knightley was dressed as Sabé, the handmaiden she played in “Star Wars: Phantom Menace”; Alexander Skarsgård appeared as an imperial adviser; and Laura Dern arrived in the draped severity of Amilyn Holdo from “Star Wars: The Last Jedi.”
It all made perfect sense, it seemed. The gala landed on May 4 this year — “May the Fourth Be With You” day. But here’s the thing: The images, polished and plausibly Getty, were entirely fake.
As guests were still filing into the Met Gala on the first Monday of May, the internet was already saturated with images of what was, ostensibly, unfolding in real time. On TikTok, Instagram, and X, AI-generated visions of the red carpet circulated alongside, and often faster than, the official photographs. Mostly anonymous posters imagined celebrities who weren’t even in attendance, styling them with precision: Justin Bieber paired with Hailey Bieber in matching Picasso pastiche; Britney Spears draped as the Mona Lisa; Lady Gaga resurfacing in archival Mugler she never actually wore.
Tools like Grok were used to push these transformations further, rerendering bodies from “fit to fat,” treating the celebrity form as endlessly adjustable. Even the celebrities themselves fed into the loop: Katy Perry appeared in six-fingered gloves, a wink at AI’s telling distortions, while fans placed her on a mock Vogue cover before she had even posed for paparazzi.
It wasn’t Perry’s first encounter with this dynamic. In 2024, an AI-generated image of her in a floral gown fooled thousands. She later embraced the moment, sharing her own machine-made looks on Instagram. But this year, the AI images were no longer fringe curiosities but near-indistinguishable counterparts of the real thing. In one telling episode, the model Gigi Hadid’s father, Mohamed Hadid, gushed over a fabricated image of his daughter in a gilded gown, mistaking it for the real thing.
The Met Gala has always been optimized for real-time consumption, a ritual of staggered reveals designed to dominate feeds for a few concentrated hours. With AI, what was once a sequence of steps — red carpet entrance, photograph, publication — now happens all at once. It is a kind of participatory styling exercise conducted at scale.
Some might argue that this shift unsettles the hierarchy that has traditionally governed the gala’s visual economy. Institutions like Vogue and figures like Anna Wintour no longer hold exclusive control over how the night is seen, with official photographs now competing with a flood of synthetic ones that seem to travel just as far, with many of them raking in tens of thousands of likes and in some cases going viral.
Celebrities, long the central figures of the gala, become something closer to raw material. Their likenesses are now reimagined at will. Again, this isn’t entirely new. From early viral AI experiments (Will Smith eating spaghetti) to Meta’s introduction of celebrity chatbots in 2023, public figures have served as test cases for the technology’s capabilities. And the Met Gala, possibly the most vivid display of celebrity, is a natural ally for AI.
An early example of collective AI image-making emerged in 2023, when Nicki Minaj’s fans collectively generated “Gag City” — a sprawling, AI-rendered metropolis inspired by the album artwork for “Pink Friday 2.” They demonstrated how people could construct shared visual worlds in real time, alongside Minaj’s official rollout. The AI Met Gala operates on a similar principle: Users collaboratively project their own fantasies onto a real-life prompt, making the result almost as convincing as the source material.
The AI Met Gala points to a broader recalibration of how events are experienced. The internet platforms that gave us the illusion of proximity to celebrities — sharing the same timelines like we were participating in their world — now give us the opportunity to remake that world wholesale. We are no longer just content to watch and react; we generate, in real time, parallel versions that compete for attention and, in some cases, supersede the original.
The most striking thing about this year’s gala may not be what anyone actually wore but how quickly and convincingly those looks were outnumbered by the ones they didn’t wear.