It happened to me: I thought the image of the pope in a coat was real.
Here’s my first excuse: I don’t really know much about popes. His holiness can be out there doing his things, and I can be over here doing mine, and our ecosystems never really cross.
I think I just idly assumed: this one is the cool pope, right?
We had the really popey pope, and then the German pope who looked a bit like he might be in Star Wars, and now we have the cool pope.
Right?
He’s always doing tweets and saying something very slightly liberal.
He’s cool!
So I thought wearing a really big coat and looking like a Metal Gear Solid 2 boss battle might have been part of his ongoing cool guy shtick.
Lord, forgive me.
As it turns out, the image of the pope in a big coat, which was doing the rounds on social media this weekend, was generated by AI.
The i reliably informs me that it was created using a program called Midjourney and was seemingly first shared on a Reddit page dedicated to AI art, before going viral on Twitter.
This was shocking for me, because as someone who is 35 and self-identifies as “too online”, I thought I was above being hoodwinked in this way.
I have lived through every era of the internet:
- really slow Jpeg downloads,
- not clicking links in case they were a Rick Astley video,
- staring deep into the maw of goatse,
- flash games where you beat up Osama bin Laden,
- “Star Wars kid”,
- apologetic crowdfunding to say sorry to “Star Wars kid”,
- making friends with an American guy on a forum,
- really seriously playing Farmville,
- following Stephen Fry on Twitter,
- having an opinion about The Dress, and
- actually posting photos of my meals on Instagram with a big heavy-handed Sierra filter over the top of it.
Now we’re in the bland bit of internet before the supposed advent of web 3.0 – Facebook is basically an inaccurate local newspaper, Twitter is a big fight, and everything else is just Accept Cookies?, pop-ups and the first 100 words of a Substack.
I thought I knew my way around.
So it has shocked me quite fundamentally to be pranked by an AI version of the pope.
Here’s the thing: I actually wondered, “Is this image AI?” when I first saw it.
I pinched and zoomed in. I checked the hands (like all young artists, AI struggles with hands).
They looked normal and real.
He seemed to be carrying a small sack of what I assumed was “Pope Salts”, and I thought that detail was too textured for what AI was doing. Continue reading
- Joel Golby is a writer for the Guardian and Vice, and the author of Brilliant, Brilliant, Brilliant Brilliant Brilliant