If, over the last few days, you were tricked into thinking Pope Francis has a sense of street style to rival Paul Mescal's, you're not alone.
Social media was sent into a frenzy by photos of the head of the Catholic Church stepping out wearing what looked like a full-length white puffer version of his traditional vestments, with an exaggeratedly voluminous hood and a nipped-in waist.
OKAAYYY pic.twitter.com/MliHsksX7L
— leon (@skyferrori) March 25, 2023
Paired with his skull cap or zucchetto, as well as a long silver cross on a chain, the look seemed eerily believable for a man who has worn arguably more extravagant outfits. It wasn't long before he was christened "Balenciaga Pope".
Almost as fast, it was revealed to be an AI-generated image.
Titled "The Pope Drip" and published on Reddit, the image was created using Midjourney, an artificial intelligence tool that can generate images in seconds based on prompts given by the user.
AI image generators, such as OpenAI's DALL-E and Stable Diffusion, let anyone create images by describing what they want to see. The software has been trained on millions of images from the web, which it then takes to create the AI image.
As those who have studied these images note, one way to spot an AI image is to look at the hands: AI can turn the Pope into a fashion icon but it can't always render a realistic hand.
In just three days, the image migrated from Reddit to Twitter and beyond, fooling scores of people into thinking it was a real photo of the Pope. As journalist Ryan Broderick put it on Twitter, "Balenciaga pope might be the first real mass-level AI misinformation case".
"My theory as to why it's fooling so many (myself initially included) is that the pope aesthetically exists in the same uncanny valley as most AI art", he added.
I thought the pope's puffer jacket was real and didnt give it a second thought. no way am I surviving the future of technology
— chrissy teigen (@chrissyteigen) March 26, 2023
Thousands of social media users were fooled by the image, including television personality Chrissy Teigen.
"Simply amazed that I thought this was real last night (albeit a few pints in)", Twitter user @seanbeegee wrote. "First time I've ever been completely fooled by AI. A personal milestone really. Looking forward to the total dissolution of meaning!"
