People online praised Pope Francis’ style this weekend after images of him wearing trendy clothes went viral. But the photos of him in a white puffer jacket are actually fake.
The AI-generated images of Francis seemed to originate from a subreddit dedicated to the Midjourney AI program on Friday and were later widely spread On twitter. The images misled dozens of users, in one of the first cases of large-scale misinformation stemming from artificial intelligence.
As AI art programs become more accessible, people have been able to conjure up all kinds of fake, hyper-real images. While there are still flaws in many of these newer programs, they are getting better, making it harder to tell the real thing from the fake.
Even celebrity Chrissy Teigen was taken in. “I thought the Pope’s puffer jacket was real and didn’t think twice. There’s no way I’m going to survive the future of technology.» tweeted Teigen.
“So, today I was a year old when I found out that this image of Pope Francis in a puffer jacket was generated by AI… First AI image that has fooled me”, another user tweeted.
There was a spike in searches for the pope shortly after photos of him with the balloon were posted on Twitter, according to Google trends. A tweet of the balloon images was retweeted more than 25,000 times as of Monday afternoon.
Images of the pope circulated a few days after bizarre AI images of arrested former President Donald Trump went viral. While many people were skeptical of the Trump photos, many users believed the Pope’s images were real, illustrating the AI’s enhanced realism.
Still, there were some telltale signs that the pope’s images were AI-generated, including crooked hands and a warped recreation of his crucifix.
The person behind the viral IA image did not immediately respond to a request for comment and NBC News was unable to verify their identity. in a interview with BuzzFeedhe said: «I just thought it was funny to see the Pope in a funny jacket.»
He added that it’s «definitely scary» that «people are running around with it and thought it was real without questioning it.»