KATSEYE's Lara Raj calls a fake AI video of her disgusting

A fabricated video of KATSEYE's Lara Raj saying a racial slur is not real. The clip, which presents her in what looks like a podcast interview and puts offensive language and a slur in her mouth, circulated online until Raj answered it directly, in a message posted to her Weverse account.

"i havent been addressing things lately as much because i feel it often fuels the darkness and hate, but this is something i feel called to speak about," she wrote. "seeing this disgusting ai deepfake video of me that is spreading genuinely breaks my heart. I cant believe such horrible people exist in this world to even think of creating something like this let alone do it, and fabricate a narrative of me or ANYONE saying such hurtful words."

She went on: "People often forget we are human beings with feelings, in our teens and early 20s and are not made of steel. Doing things like this can truly be so harmful."

Raj is 20. She thanked the fans who checked on her, wrote that she appreciated them, and asked them to keep spreading kindness. The dating is slightly inconsistent between outlets: Complex dates the message to Tuesday, September 22, while Hindustan Times and IBTimes Singapore published their reports on September 23 describing it as a Wednesday message. Both agree on the substance of what she wrote, which is quoted above in her own spelling.

The response from fans was to stop amplifying it. Accounts urged people to report the video rather than share it, and called on KATSEYE's labels, HYBE and Geffen Records, to pursue whoever made and circulated it. Neither label has said publicly what it intends to do.

What makes this one worth reading beyond the cruelty is the setting the fake chose. A podcast interview is the cheapest synthetic format there is to produce right now: two voices, one camera, a conversational rhythm most listeners already accept as casual and unscripted. The technology to do it is in consumer tools, it takes minutes, and the result is designed to be heard rather than examined. A slurry of disclaimers is not attached, and the video travels on the assumption that audiences will not go looking for one.

Raj is not a hypothetical case. KATSEYE is at the point where a fabricated clip reaches the exact audience most likely to believe it, days before the group's debut as the musical guest on Saturday Night Live's season 52 premiere on September 26, alongside host Jalen Brunson. The North American leg of the WILDWORLD tour starts in Miami on October 13.

The legal position behind her is thinner than it looks. There is no federal right-of-publicity statute covering synthetic replicas, only a patchwork of state laws and a bill, the NO FAKES Act, that has not passed. When the person in the video is a working artist rather than a studio asset, the practical remedy is usually a platform takedown request, which requires identifying the poster and asking a company to agree.

If you make synthetic video, the line Raj described is the one to hold: a fabricated clip of a real person saying something they never said is not satire, it is putting words in a stranger's mouth, and the person on the other end of it is twenty years old and reading the replies.