Photo: Franco Origlia/Getty Images
By: The opinion Posted Mar 28, 2023, 21:42 pm EDT
Over the weekend, a video went viral on Twitter. image of Pope Francis in a puffy white coatAnd it seems many people believed that it was a real image.
According to the site specialized in technology, Ars Technica, actually that image that impressed many users of social networks was made with the help of artificial intelligencespecifically with the Midjourney program.
The image of the Pope, created with Midjourney v5 (an AI image synthesis model), first appeared in a tweet from a user named Leon (@skyferrori) on Saturday and quickly began circulating as part of other meme tweets that also featured similar images, including one that humorously speculated about a “lifestyle brand” of the Pope.
At first sight, the fake photo looks quite realistic. And as The Verge points out, an elegant image of Pope Francis plays with our beliefss about the papacy, which often involves wild, not fake images, although Pope Francis is known for his “humble” outfits.
At the moment, the three main image synthesis models Midjourney, DALL-E and Stable Diffusion they allow users to generate novel images using only text descriptions called “prompts”.
In this case, the message used to create the photo of the Pope in that impressive jacket could have been as simple as “Pope Francis in a puffy white coat”, because Midjourney has made great leaps in photorealism recently, rendering complex scenes full of detail from relatively simple messages.
Twitter had to put out a warning
The image went viral in a few hours and was shared millions of timeslike other images inspired by that supposed photo of Pope Francis, in fact the original tweet has more than 27 million views.
Shortly after, Twitter attached a warning to the tweet context added by readers that read: “This is an AI-generated image of Pope Francis. It is not a genuine photo”.
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