I Was Not Even There—Deep Fakes by Dr. Timothy Smith

Photo Source: Wikimedia Commons

Over the past few days, some red-carpet photos set off a storm of criticism for the celebrated singer Billie Eilish for her fashion choices at the 2025 Met Gala. However, Eilish did not even attend the event! The Met Gala occurs on the first Monday in May every year. The fundraising event began in 1948 to get donations to support the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, New York. Even after the Costume Institute, which contains objects related to fashionable dress since the 15th century, merged with the Metropolitan Museum in 1946, the Institute remains responsible for its funding. In the early years after the merger, a fashion publicist, Eleanor Lambert, and the president of the department store Lord & Taylor, Dorothy Shaver, devised a midnight supper fundraiser and called it the “Party of the Year.” (britanica.com) Tickets for the first “Party of the Year” sold for $50 per person. Today, invitation-only tickets cost $75,000, and tables of ten start at $350,000.

Today, the Met Gala is a major social event for celebrities from the film, music, and sports worlds—often called the “Oscars of the East Coast.” The event has a theme every year that coincides with an exhibition in the Institute. In keeping with the themes, the red carpet showcases celebrities and designers who interpret the theme differently. Soon after the 2025 Met Gala, images of Billie Eilish wearing an oversized blue blazer covered with large red roses began circulating on social media. The image almost immediately garnered negative comments in light of the 2025 gala theme, “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style.” Comments noted her poor alignment with the theme. The image of Eilish on the red carpet constitutes another deep fake from an AI tool used to modify images from the original ones.

The negative comments and “trash talk” about Eilish prompted the singer to respond on social media to debunk the images as she explained that she was not even in New York at the time of the Gala. (elle.com) She was in the Netherlands performing on her world tour. The ease of use and access of powerful AI models for image manipulation, including video and audio, has become mainstream.

It appears that the image manipulation will only get more challenging to detect and begs the question of how celebrities, politicians, and even regular people protect themselves from the potentially damaging effects of deep fakes on careers, reputations, and even political lives. The crucial elements of deep fakes that superimpose one person involve location. The initial fake can use someone else’s red-carpet walk as the basis of the fake, but the subject of the fake is not at that location. The major social media companies may need to offer a service that considers an individual’s actual geolocation when publishing an image of that person. For example, suppose an image depicts Billie Eilish in New York on the first Monday of May, but her geolocation account clearly shows her in the Netherlands. In that case, the image must automatically get labeled as a fake. Such a solution involved personal data sharing, but with the proper security measures, serious consequences of deep fakes, such as market-moving declarations from the president, could be avoided.

Dr. Smith’s career in scientific and information research spans the areas of bioinformatics, artificial intelligence, toxicology, and chemistry. He has published a number of peer-reviewed scientific papers. He has worked over the past seventeen years developing advanced analytics, machine learning, and knowledge management tools to enable research and support high-level decision making. Tim completed his Ph.D. in Toxicology at Cornell University and a Bachelor of Science in chemistry from the University of Washington.

You can buy his book on Amazon in paperback and in kindle format here.