Over the weekend, a photo of Pope Francis looking dapper in a white puffer jacket went mega-viral on social media. Apparently, the 86-year-old acting pontiff has a serious drip. But there was only one problem: the image is not real. It was made using the artificial intelligence art tool Midjourney.
When word spread on the Internet that the image was generated by AI, many expressed surprise. “I thought the Pope’s puffer jacket was real and I didn’t think twice,” Chrissy Teigen tweeted. “There’s no way I’m going to survive the future of technology.” garbage day Ryan Broderick, newsletter writer and former BuzzFeed News reporter called him “the first real case of AI disinformation on a mass level”, immediately after Fake images of Donald Trump’s arrest by police in New York last week.
Now, for the first time, the image’s creator has shared the story of how he created the photograph that fooled the world.
Pablo Xavier, a 31-year-old construction worker from the Chicago area who declined to share his last name for fear of being attacked for creating the images, said he was tripping over mushrooms last week when he came up with the idea for the image.
“I’m trying to find ways to do something fun because that’s what I normally try to do,” he told BuzzFeed News. “I try to do fun things or trippy art, psychedelic things. It just occurred to me: I should do the Pope. Then it came like a flood: ‘The Pope in a Balenciaga puffer coat, Moncler, walking down the streets of Rome, Paris,’ stuff like that.”
It generated the first three images around 2 pm local time last Friday. (She first started using Midjourney after one of her brothers died in November. “It pretty much all started with that, just dealing with grief and creating images of my previous brother,” she said. “I fell in love with it after that.”)
When Pablo Xavier first saw the images of the Pope, he said: “I thought they were perfect.” So he posted them to a Facebook group called AI Art Universe and then to Reddit. He was shocked when the images quickly went viral. “I was impressed,” he said. “I didn’t want it to blow up like that.”
