An image of Pope Francis, the leader of the Catholic Church, wearing a large white puffer jacket has gone viral on social media in recent days. The 86-year-old Pope looks stylish and many have commented on his fashionable outfits, but he has one problem. The image is not real.
The photo above was generated by Midjourney, an artificial intelligence that generates images based on text prompts, and was posted to Reddit on March 24th by an artist named u/trippy_art_special. This user’s account was subsequently suspended, but one image (the one on the left) went viral on his Twitter, fooling many.
Should I worry? Web Culture Expert Ryan Broderick called Pope’s Image “First real public-level AI misinformation incident”. However, the problem has actually been happening for several weeks following an update to Midjourney that significantly improved the standard of output. has also gone viral. These images were generated from prompts provided by Elliott Higgins, founder of Bellingcat, an investigative journalism group.
Elinor Carmi of City University of London said:
Fear of fake AI is nothing new. For several years, we have faced the threat of deepfake images of people’s faces, generated by early-generation AI trained on smaller amounts of information. Obvious signs of forgery were frequently seen, such as ears. Midjourney still struggles with hand manipulation, often adding fingers, but people can be fooled when faced with images where the hand is not the focal point, such as an AI pope.
Scale is also an issue, says Agnes Venema of the University of Malta. The r/midjourney subreddit where the Pope’s image was posted has an equally compelling example of an AI-generated image created by its 143,000 members. They include a series of photographs documenting the fictitious earthquake that struck the United States and Canada in 2001, influencing their own lore. The highest voted comment for this post is: People in 2100 won’t know what part of history was true…”
“The fact that it’s been accessible to so many people means it’s become more democratic in a way. . “As it becomes more real and accessible to more people, we have to be more careful and the risk of someone committing this kind of deception increases.”
Ultimately, the rapid rise of AI means that some disruption is inevitable. Carmi says he is expected to board the AI revolution without fully grasping its implications. That means we need to be more media literate to be able to easily create and spread fake images. “Most of our society is left without understanding how these technologies work, what their purpose is, and what their consequences are,” she says.
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