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Pope in a coat looks good but look again

pope in a coat

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:

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

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