Poor Rihanna fell ill the night of Met Gala 2024 so she stayed home while an AI clone attended in her place.
Wait, what?
In reality, Rihanna apparently caught some sort of stomach bug and couldn't attend Met Gala 2024.
Pretty serious stuff, when you think about the commitments these celebs make to hit the red carpet: preparing a custom look, hiring a styling team, flying around and booking hotels all adds up, y'know.
Beau A$AP Rocky apparently stayed by her side because he didn't show up at this year's Met Gala either. Shame because Rocky and Rihanna are perpetual shoo-ins for best-dressed.
You might not know that, however, were you to check the trending Rihanna tag on Twitter (or X or whatever).
Because there, amidst many fans bemoaning Rihanna's supposed lack of presence, are what appear to be images of a beaming Rihanna wearing a typically extravagant Met Gala-worthy look.
And, hey! There's even a statue of her inside the Met Museum itself, for some reason!
Total fabrication of course, an AI deepfake in the case of the former and a misleading screengrab in the latter.
But believable enough, to be sure, so long as you don't notice that one of the background photographers appears to have a broken neck and that one of the his peers is being absorbed by his camera.
This is really just a sign of the times, unfortunately.
AI is so ominously omnipresent that rappers are now coming back from the dead to drop diss tracks. It's an unfortunate thread in the fabric of our society and it ain't goin' nowhere.
And Rihanna wasn't even the only famous face to be recreated by eerie machine-learning: Katy Perry, also absent from Met Gala 2024, was situated on the red carpet in her own AI-generated outfit.
The deepfakes were so believable that Perry's own mother was bamboozled. Scary stuff, to be sure.
You could put a bright spin on this sort of thing, to be fair. At least this sort of AI tomfoolery is harmless, like last year's Balenciaga AI trickery and MSCHF's AI dating app.
And, really, the worst case scenario is that a couple people think that RIhanna and Perry showed up to Met Gala 2024. People just miss 'em that much!
But as AI becomes a familiar and even reliable tool for, say, product design, it points to a concerning timeline where convincing fake photos can be generated at the drop of a hat.
Perhaps the only solution is to arm ourselves with skepticism and never take anything for granted. Fun!
And to think, we could've avoided all this had Rihanna just showed up at the Met Gala.
Hope that album is coming along, Rih-Rih!
