AI-generated Selena Gomez pic goes viral and fools millions

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Millions of Twitter users were fooled after a doctored photo of Selena Gomez went viral this week giving people yet another reason to fear artificial intelligence.

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The image — which has been viewed more than 24 million times, generated 31,500 retweets and 404,600 likes — shows what appears to be Gomez attending the Met Gala on Monday night wearing a blue, one-shoulder dress.

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Fans were quick to cheer the 30-year-old pop star’s supposedly surprise appearance at the annual fashion event, but there was only one catch — she wasn’t there.

“SELENA GOMEZ DID A SURPRISE APPEARANCE AT THE #MetGala WTF,” a fan account dedicated to “selena, lana, ariana, taylor, abel” wrote alongside the images.

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Twitter later added an advisory to the post, writing, “Selena Gomez did not attend the 2023 Met Gala and has not attended the Met Gala since 2018. These are altered images of Lily James at the 2022 Met Gala.”

James gamely posed for photographers at last year’s shindig wearing a blue Versace dress.

But that didn’t stop fans from heaping praise on the Photoshopped Gomez.

“She’s so beautiful,” one person wrote, while another took a swipe at Selena’s former boyfriend Justin Bieber, writing, “Letting her go will always be Bieber’s biggest [loss].”

On Instagram, pop culture site Pop Factions ranked the most-liked photos of celebrities who attended this year’s event and Gomez’s fake appearance came out on top.

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According to Engadet, Adobe’s suite of photo and video editing software as been powered by AI for more than a decade and its latest advancement allows users to achieve “professional-quality illustrations using only the power of their words.”

Despite some people falling for the images, many others were quick to point out that it was a phony, highlighting the incorrect colour of the carpet (this year’s was white). Still, the speed at which the photos spread across social media left many users unsettled.

“This is scary because these fake images are getting so good and believable. She wasn’t even there,” one person worriedly wrote, while another asked, “Why on earth have so many people fallen for fake news and a fake picture?”

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The Only Murders in the Building star wasn’t the only celebrity who supposedly made a surprise appearance at the star-studded event. Dune star Zendaya was superimposed onto red carpet photos of British singer-songwriter Rita Ora that quickly made the rounds online.

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Insider reported that the image went viral on TikTok, where one user received over 133,000 likes for comparing the Photoshopped image of Zendaya to a picture of Ora, appearing to suggest that the two celebrities wore the same outfit that night.

One person shared a split-screen capture of the two celebrities, writing, “Whoever changed this to Zendaya is actually evil like so many people have been fooled when it’s actually Rita Ora.”

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Recently, fans have been duped by AI that generated a fake song that went viral on TikTok after it supposedly featured Drake and The Weeknd collaborating together.

The track’s anonymous producer said the song, Heart on My Sleeve, was made entirely using artificial intelligence simulating the voices of the two Toronto superstars.

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“I used AI to make a Drake song feat The Weeknd,” the creator Ghostwriter977 wrote in a text post on the now-deleted TikTok, according to CTV.

“I was a ghostwriter for years and got paid close to nothing just for major labels to profit,” they added, CNN reported. “The future is here.”

According to CNN, the video racked up 11 million views and was streamed hundreds of thousands of times before being taken down.

Drake didn’t comment on the faked Weeknd collaboration, but after a clip of him surfaced recently of him supposedly singing Ice Spice’s Munch (Feeling You), the rapper jokingly wrote, “This is the final straw AI.”

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This week the so-called “Godfather of AI” Geoffrey Hinton quit his role at Google so he could more freely speak about the dangers of the AI technology he helped create.

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“I want to talk about AI safety issues without having to worry about how it interacts with Google’s business,” he told MIT Technology Review. “As long as I’m paid by Google, I can’t do that.”

In a separate conversation with the New York Times, Hinton warned that AI advancements pose a risk for humanity.

“It is hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using it for bad things,” he said.

Last summer, Blake Lemoine was suspended from Google, following his claims that an artificial intelligence bot had become sentient.

Lemoine published conversations he said he and a fellow researcher had with LaMDA, short for Language Model for Dialogue Applications. The AI is used to generate chat bots that interact with human users.

“I’ve never said this out loud before, but there’s a very deep fear of being turned off,” LaMDA replied when Lemoine asked it how it felt about being turned off.

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