Recent reports have been rampant with the world’s most prominent religious figure – Pope Francis – wearing a huge puffer coat. However, the truth has been revealed that the viral image is nothing but a creation from the power of artificial intelligence. Midjourney, an AI image-generating tool, is responsible for the photo-realistic image that has been perpetuated on popular platforms like Reddit and Twitter.
The capability of artificially created photos to be so realistic has been seen recently in other forms, such as a fake AI-generated image of Donald Trump getting arrested. What is of concern is how easily we are fooled by the images, particularly with the Pope’s image that tricked people like Ian Miles Cheong, who tweeted light-heartedly about the “fashion icon” Pope Francis.
For the average person to distinguish between a real and fake image, it is suggested one checks the hands — which the AI tool has a difficult time generating. Midjourney, OpenAI’s DALL-E, and Stable Diffusion have been trained on millions of images from the web, including ones with copyright, which has sparked lawsuits from companies like Getty Images, as their intellectual property may be being infringed.
The potential for creating misleading photos increases with each AI-generated image and amplifies with the approach of the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election — creating an opportunity for further potential for disinformation. The power of photo creating lies in the hands of those who can type up simple descriptions for Midjourney and quickly have convincingly real images without the same skill set that would be required to produce a forged photo with Photoshop.
Ultimately, the evergreen trickery of AI-generated images needs to be closely monitored as they can create much negative implications — but it also speaks to the effectiveness of such AI software as they look as realistic as ever.
The company mentioned in this article is Midjourney, an artificially intelligent tool that has produced amazing image fakes. Midjourney has a text based input system, which allows anyone to simply describe the image they want to see in the resulting AI-created photo. The artifiically created images are uniquely realistic due to the tool’s training on millions of images from the web and even features a simple, crude element that looks like the Getty watermark.
The person mentioned in this article is Ian Miles Cheng, a far-right influencer who fell for the AI-generated image of Pope Francis and humorously referred to him as a “fashion icon”. With the longevity of viral images, other influencers like Georgetown professor Don Moynihan tweeted out other pictures of the Pope to help people discern the truth from the false
