Katy Perry

Katy Perry (born Katheryn Hudson, 1984) is one of the best-selling pop artists ever, with a run of hits — “I Kissed a Girl,” “Firework,” “Roar” — that made Teenage Dream the first album by a woman to produce five Billboard No. 1 singles. She later spent seven seasons as an American Idol judge.

The letter and the deepfakes

In April 2024 Perry signed the Artist Rights Alliance open letter, joining more than 200 artists — including Billie Eilish and Nicki Minaj — in demanding that AI developers and platforms stop using AI to “infringe upon and devalue the rights of human artists” and warning that an “assault on human creativity must be stopped.”

Weeks later she became the face of a different AI problem. Photorealistic fake images of Perry at the 2024 Met Gala racked up hundreds of thousands of engagements on X while she was actually in the recording studio — and fooled her own mother, whose credulous text Perry posted with the reply “lol mom the AI got you too, BEWARE!” The stunt repeated in 2025 with a new crop of viral fakes; this time Perry noted she was “actually with my mom so she’s safe from the bots,” adding she was “praying for the rest of y’all.”

Perry has not campaigned against AI beyond the letter, and her breezy tone about the fakes contrasts with peers who treat deepfakes as an existential threat. Her position is that of a rights-holder demanding consent and compensation, not a crusader against the technology.