Pope puffer jacket: Should you be worried that an AI picture went viral?

A picture of Pope Francis, the chief of the Catholic church, sporting a big, white puffer jacket has gone viral on social media up to now few days. The 86-year-old pontiff seems trendy, with many individuals commenting on his modern garments. There is only one downside: the picture isn’t actual.

The images above have been generated by the factitious intelligence Midjourney, which produces pictures primarily based on textual content prompts, and have been posted on Reddit on 24 March by an artist who goes by the title of u/trippy_art_special. The consumer’s account has since been suspended, however one picture (the left-hand one) has since unfold throughout Twitter, the place it has fooled many.

Ought to we be apprehensive? Internet tradition skilled Ryan Broderick has known as the pope picture “the primary actual mass-level AI misinformation case”. However the challenge has really been brewing for a couple of weeks, following an replace to Midjourney that considerably improved the usual of output. Earlier in March, Midjourney-created pictures of former US president Donald Trump being arrested equally went viral. These pictures have been generated from prompts supplied by Eliot Higgins, the founding father of Bellingcat, an investigative journalism group.

“I feel that is an instance of a wider downside of applied sciences being pushed into our societies with none oversight, regulation or requirements,” says Elinor Carmi at Metropolis, College of London.

Fears of AI fakery aren’t new. For a number of years, we now have confronted the specter of deepfaked pictures of individuals’s faces, produced by earlier generations of AI skilled on smaller volumes of data, however they’ve incessantly had telltale indicators of fakery, similar to non-blinking eyes or blurred ears. Midjourney nonetheless struggles with arms, typically including further fingers, however when confronted by a picture the place arms aren’t the main target, such because the AI pope, folks might be fooled.

There may be additionally a problem of scale, says Agnes Venema on the College of Malta. The r/midjourney subreddit the place the pope pictures have been posted has examples of different, equally convincing AI-generated pictures produced by its 143,000 members. They embody a sequence of images documenting a fictional earthquake that hit the US and Canada in 2001 that has impressed its personal lore. The highest-voted touch upon the submit reads: “Folks in 2025 are going to have an actual troublesome time with misinformation. Folks in 2100 gained’t know which elements of historical past have been actual…”

“I feel the truth that so many individuals can now entry it – in a means, it’s extra democratic – implies that, in a means, the floodgates have opened,” says Venema. “The extra life like it will get and the extra folks acquire entry, the extra cautious we ought to be and the extra threat there may be of somebody performing on such a deception.”

In the end, the speedy rise of AI means some disruption is inevitable. Carmi says we’re being anticipated to hop on board the AI revolution with out absolutely greedy its affect – that means we want higher media literacy of how simple it’s to create and unfold faux pictures. “Most of our society has been left behind, not understanding how these applied sciences work, for what functions and what are the implications of that,” she says.