AI-generated image of Pope Francis in a puffy white coat for the weekend caught a virus On Twitter, many believed it was a real image. Since then, Puffy Pope has inspired commentary on the deceptive nature of AI-generated images.
The image of the pope created with Midjourney v5 (AI image synthesis model) is first appeared on twitter A user named Leon (@skyferroi) on Saturday quickly began circulating as part of other meme tweets featuring similar images. guess humorously About the Pope “lifestyle brand”.
Shortly thereafter, Twitter attached a reader-added contextual warning to the tweet.This is an AI-generated image of Pope Francis. Not a real photo.“
As noted in last week’s article about AI-generated Donald Trump arrest photos, Twitter’s guidelines state that users “must not falsely share synthetic or manipulated media that may cause harm.” increase. In this case, the line between harm and parody may be blurry.
How can you be sure an image is fake? Apart from a Reddit post containing an alternate image of the Pope, presumably from the person who created it, The Verge has a piece analyzing the impact of fake images. Analyzes the evidence fairly well. For example, zooming in on the details reveals signs of image synthesis in distorted details such as the Pope’s cross necklace, the crooked shadow of his spectacles, and what he is holding (a cup?). You can
Still, at first glance, the fake photo (“fake”?) looks pretty real. As The Verge points out, Pope Francis’ stylish image influences our beliefs about the papacy.
halfway trip
Midjourney, an image service used to create fake photos, debuted last year. Along with DALL-E and Stable Diffusion, he is one of the three major image synthesis models popular online. All three allow users to generate novel images using only text descriptions called “prompts”.
In this case, the prompt used to create the picture of the puffy pope could have been as simple as “Pope Francis in a puffy white coat.” This is because Midjourney recently took a giant leap into photorealism, rendering complex scenes full of detail from relatively simple prompts.
What this almost effortless ability to fake photos means for the future of the medium remains to be seen, but as we speculated earlier, due to image synthesis, we may never be able to believe what we see online again. I can’t.