When he was running for president in 1999, Al Gore made the unforgettable claim in a CNN interview that he had, in fact, invented the internet.

At least that’s how the now infamous remark has been translated over the years. His actual words were a little more garbled. “During my service in the United States Congress,” he said, “I took the initiative in creating the internet.”

Paris Hilton poses for photographers upon arrival at the 69th Cannes international film festival in southern France in 2016. Associated Press/Joel Ryan

Paris Hilton, the hotel heiress and consummate socialite of the early 2000s, made an equally bold assertion Wednesday, telling W magazine that she had invented the selfie.

Unlike Gore, the 36-year-old “celebrity entrepreneur” of reality show and sex tape fame didn’t seem to equivocate. Per W magazine:

“Despite Hilton’s longtime dependency on various cellular devices, it is perhaps visionaries like Steve Jobs who are indebted to her, seeing that it was Hilton who took their creations beyond their wildest expectations, inventing along the way the maligned but ubiquitous selfie.

“‘If a beeper had a camera, I would have taken a selfie with it,’ Hilton said later, agreeing that she was truthfully the matriarch of the modern phenomenon. ‘I think I have a selfie from when I was a little kid, like on a disposable camera.'”

The story goes on to say that Hilton was “shaping up to be a pioneer and prophet of the zeitgeist as we know it,” proving “you can get paid to be yourself, and that ‘yourself’ can be a multi-hyphenated entity.”

“She did this all without a publicist, a stylist, glam squad, or social media,” the story says.

Whether any of that qualifies Hilton to anoint herself inventor of the selfie, well, that’s a different story.

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