Pope Francis has recently been the target of a fake image that was circulating on social media. The image shows him wearing a large white puffer coat, which appeared to be a believable photo until internet investigators uncovered its real origins. It was actually a fabricated image created using a software program called Midjourney, which can generate photo-realistic images using artificial intelligence.
Midjourney has been used for a variety of different images including former President Donald Trump’s arrest and Trump himself, although these images have all been fabrications. Interestingly enough, Midjourney has a hard time creating convincing hands which helps to tell it apart from real photographs. This could be an indicator of the standard these software programs have reached, and it could change in the future.
AI image generators like DALL-E, Stable Diffusion, and Midjourney use natural language descriptions to produce pictures, which have been trained on millions of online images. This has caught the attention of companies such as Getty Images and led to several copyright infringement lawsuits. Stable Diffusion’s image generator occasionally includes elements resembling the Getty watermark, which further bolsters their argument.
The U.S. Copyright Office recently ruled that AI-generated images cannot be copyrighted, which gives those interested in using such images in media an interesting development. Nonetheless, these software programs have shown the ease at which very realistic fabrications can be produced, making one think of how these techniques will be applied as the 2024 presidential election approaches.
DALL-E is an application developed by OpenAI for automatically generating digital images of high quality in response to a given natural language-based description. It was unveiled at an OpenAI event in February 2021 and has been gaining both media and academic attention since then, due to its potential applications to all elements of digital content creation.
Jorge Mario Bergoglio is the birth name of Pope Francis. He is the leader of the Roman Catholic Church and is based in the Vatican, where he is the first Jesuit pope, first pope from the Americas, and first pope from the Southern Hemisphere. He is a champion for the poor and the marginalized, and has advocated for social, political, and economic reform. His teachings and calls for respect for human dignity have been praised by many, and his efforts continue to be a source of inspiration today.
