You may have come across several images of Pope Francis online recently looking fashionably on point in a white puffer coat and a large cross on a chain hanging over his chest.
Before you start wondering if the Pope is experimenting with a new look, be warned that those images are fake – created via artificial intelligence, or AI. A total of four images of the Pope were first posted on the r/midjourney subreddit on Saturday . Midjourney is an app that generates images using language prompts in which you describe the image you want to see using text – and the subreddit is where people go to share their creations.Images of Pope Francis wearing a large white puffer jacket are fake, created by AI. I thought the Pope’s puffer jacket was real and didn’t give it a second thought. No way am I surviving the future of technology.
Several people responding to her tweet agreed that they were left similarly confused by the images. One person wrote in response: “Not only did I not realize it was fake, I also saw a tweet from someone else saying it was AI and thought HE was joking.” Some people have been sharing advice on how to spot if a photo is fake, including checking the hands and fingers in a photo as these image generating apps haven’t quite perfected these yet.
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