Puffer coat pope is faked AI art, and it won’t be the last

Pope Francis: Make it fashionable. Midjourney was created by a user who made a viral image that showed the pope in a coat that would have looked great on a Balenciaga runway. This image was viral not because it was too absurd but because it made people laugh. Was believable. It is possible that the pope may have drip but not quite like this.

The Balenciaga pope went so massively viral in a way the internet hasn’t seen before with AI art, internet culture expert Ryan Broderick pointed out. It appears that the image was posted on Friday to Midjourney along with three others. The viral image is believed to be the convincing one, possibly due to its background or lighting. No matter the reason, many people were convinced it was true. It was true, and I was convinced when I searched Google for more photos. Chrissy TeigenMany others believed it to be real.

When you look closely, you can start to see the details that confirm it’s a fake: a weird shadow around the glasses, a strange grasp on whatever the pope is holding, a shimmering blur. But when you’re scrolling on Twitter you don’t see those details up close; you chuckle at the image, admiring the pope’s fit, and then keep scrolling. It’s especially convincing when you see the fake image alongside real — and uncanny — photos of the pope.

We are back to the unbelievability that the pope wore a Balenciaga suit coat. The same man who met with people before a huge sculpture that looked straight out of “The Godfather” Diablo 4. That’s the pope who received a Lamborghini from Pope Francis, which ended up fetching $1.2 million in a charity auction. (Honestly, in doing research for this story, I thought the Lamborghini photo might be faked, too — it’s not.) His Holiness is the first pope to tweet. Heck, Esquire put Pope Benedict on its best-dressed list in 2007, and the Vatican put out a statement in response: “The pope, in summary, does not wear Prada, but Christ,” it said. Pope Francis made Esquire’s best-dressed list in 2013.

The puffy pope photo was likely the first time a mass number of people have been fooled by AI art, and as programs like Midjourney continue to improve, it certainly won’t be the last. As The Verge put it, the pope and his sick puffer coat going to incredibly viral is “both scary and reassuring, because it suggests there is currently a limit to what AI fakes are believable but scary because this technology is moving too fast for any current reassurances to hold true for long.”