Pope Francis in a long white Balenciaga-inspired puffer jacket. Francis rocking aviators and revving a motorcycle down a busy street. Francis changing tables in a dark nightclub. Francis in a tactical vest, preparing to fly a fighter jet. Francis sharing a beer at Burning Man.
Dozens of photos showing the leader of the world’s Roman Catholics in bizarre settings have surfaced in recent weeks, making social media nervous. Aside from the pontiff himself, all the images have one thing in common: they are fakes, created with artificial intelligence tools that create images from brief text prompts.
Many public figures, including basketball star LeBron James and several real housewives, have recently appeared in AI-generated images, but the images featuring Francis have caused the biggest stir. They have garnered more views, likes and comments than many other AI photos, according to a review by The New York Times, sparking a race to portray the 86-year-old in increasingly bizarre situations.
“I had to get involved with the Pope thing,” one Reddit user recently wrote alongside AI footage of Francis practicing martial arts, playing basketball and skateboarding. “Getting on the pope’s bandwagon,” said another, sharing an image of the pontiff speaking to a crowd of cyclists.
The prevalence of Francis in AI-generated images is the result of a perfect storm of factors, religious experts said. After 10 years as the leader of the Catholic Church, he is instantly recognizable around the world. He is considered a more approachable leader than his more hardline predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI. And when combined with a sudden burst of interest in new artificial intelligence tools, Francis, who in real life is often depicted in formal settings, became a go-to choice for creators to place in the most incongruous of settings.
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ChatGPT. ChatGPT, a research lab’s artificial intelligence language model, OpenAI, has been making headlines since November for its ability to answer complex questions, write poetry, generate code, plan vacations, and translate languages. GPT-4, the latest version released in mid-March, can even respond to images (and pass the uniform bar exam).
bing. Two months after ChatGPT’s debut, Microsoft, OpenAI’s main investor and partner, added a similar chatbot, capable of having open text conversations on virtually any topic, to its Bing Internet search engine. But it was the bot’s occasionally inaccurate, misleading, and bizarre responses that garnered much of the attention after its release.
Ernie. Search giant Baidu unveiled China’s first major challenger to ChatGPT in March. Ernie’s debut, short for Enhanced Rendering Through Knowledge Integration, turned out to be a flop after it was revealed that a promised “live” demo of the bot had been recorded.
The goal, some creators said, was to show that even the Pope can relax, be reckless and have fun.
Global religious figures like the Pope are natural subjects of political satire and artistic expression, said Jennifer Herdt, a professor of Christian ethics at the Yale Divinity School. Francisco is ideal, he added, because “he is known for his simplicity, his solidarity with the poorest of the poor,” so when he is the subject of outlandish scenarios like flying a fighter plane, “it is definitely the height of incongruity, to defy expectations.”
AI images can be dangerous if people believe they are real and misuse them to spread misinformation. “You lull people into not double-checking,” said Subbarao Kambhampati, a professor of computer science at Arizona State University. “Then you are gradually displaced from reality.”
But many of the AI images showing Francis have drawn affectionate laughter for the pope, who recently had a health problem and is embroiled in a longer-than-average papacy.
“People experience Pope Francis as a pope of the people, so I would enjoy putting him in all these places where people are,” said the Rev. Serene Jones, president and professor of religion and democracy at Union Theological Seminary in New York.
The Vatican did not respond to a request for comment about the fame generated by the pope’s AI.
The image that made Francis an AI star shows him in a white puffer jacket in the style of Balenciaga, a high French fashion house, walking down the street. It was reportedly first posted on March 24 on a Reddit forum for the generative AI tool Midjourney and later shared on social media.
A tweet sharing the image, titled “Brooklyn boys could only hope for this level of dripping,” received more than 229,000 likes and was viewed 20.6 million times. By contrast, a tweet sharing AI-generated footage of former President Donald J. Trump’s arrest garnered 40,000 likes and 6.4 million views.
Midjourney, which released version 5 of its imaging tool last month, did not respond to a request for comment. The tool generates custom hyper-real images from just a few words and can now create hands with the correct number of fingers, a previous barrier to credibility.
Since then, Francis has become an AI muse. She has been shown eating fast food, meeting aliens, playing guitar at the Glastonbury Festival, scuba diving, dancing on the beach, and cleaning up biohazardous waste in a hazmat suit. The flood of papal images has been so voluminous that some people on the online generative AI forums have begged for creators to use other inspiration.
That hasn’t stopped depictions of an increasingly extravagantly dressed Francis. In some images, he has graduated from a puffer jacket to an all-black outfit with a leather jacket. In another, he’s wearing a rainbow trench coat.
Those prompted others to put Francis in a popular outfit: a sweatshirt, sweatpants and dad’s sneakers.
