Over the weekend, a photo of Pope Francis looking sharp in a white jacket went mega viral on social media. Apparently the 86-year-old incumbent pontiff has a serious drip. But there was only one problem: the image is not real. It was made using the AI Midjourney art tool.
As word spread across the internet that the image was AI-generated, many expressed surprise. “I thought the Pope’s puffer jacket was real and I didn’t think twice”, Chrissy Teigen tweeted. “There’s no way I’m going to survive the future of technology.” Garbage Day newsletter writer and former BuzzFeed News reporter Ryan Broderick call it “the first real case of AI disinformation on a massive level”, following in the footsteps of Fake images of Donald Trump being arrested by the police in New York last week.
Now, for the first time, the image’s creator has shared the story of how he came up with the photograph that fooled the world.
Pablo Xavier, a 31-year-old Chicago-area construction worker who declined to share his last name for fear of attack for creating the images, said he was tripping over mushrooms last week when he came up with the idea for the image.
“I’m trying to find ways to do something fun because that’s what I usually try to do,” he told BuzzFeed News. “I try to do fun things or trippy art, psychedelic things. I realized: should do the Pope. Then it all came out like water: ‘The Pope in a puffy coat from Balenciaga, Moncler, walking the streets of Rome, Paris,’ stuff like that.”
It generated the first three images around 2pm local time last Friday. (He first started using Midjourney after one of his brothers died in November. “It pretty much all started with that, just dealing with the pain and creating images of my old brother,” he said. It.”)
When Pablo Xavier first saw the images of the Pope, he said: “I thought they were perfect.” So he posted them on a Facebook group called AI Art Universe, and then on Reddit. He was shocked when the images quickly went viral. It just blew away,” he said. “I didn’t want it to blow up like that.”
