Should you be worried that an AI picture of the Pope went viral?

An picture of Pope Francis, the chief of the Catholic church, sporting a big, white puffer jacket has gone viral on social media previously few days. The 86-year-old pontiff appears fashionable, with many individuals commenting on his trendy garments. There is only one downside: the picture isn’t actual.

The footage above have been generated by the factitious intelligence Midjourney, which produces pictures based mostly on textual content prompts, and have been posted on Reddit on 24 March by an artist who goes by the title of u/trippy_art_special. The consumer’s account has since been suspended, however one picture (the left-hand one) has since unfold throughout Twitter, the place it has fooled many.

Should we be fearful? Web tradition professional Ryan Broderick has referred to as the Pope picture “the first real mass-level AI misinformation case”. But the difficulty has really been brewing in current weeks, following an replace to Midjourney that considerably improved the usual of output. Earlier in March, Midjourney-created pictures of former US president Donald Trump being arrested went equally viral. Those pictures have been generated from prompts supplied by Eliot Higgins, the founding father of Bellingcat, an investigative journalism web site.

“I think this is an example of a wider problem of technologies being pushed into our societies without any oversight, regulation or standards,” says Elinor Carmi at City, University of London.

Fears of AI fakery aren’t new. For a number of years, now we have confronted the specter of deepfaked pictures of individuals’s faces, produced by earlier generations of AI skilled on smaller volumes of data, however they’ve ceaselessly had telltale indicators of fakery, akin to non-blinking eyes or blurred ears. Midjourney nonetheless struggles with arms, including further fingers, however when confronted by a picture the place arms aren’t the main target, such because the AI Pope, folks might be fooled.

There can also be a problem of scale, says Agnes Venema on the University of Malta. The r/midjourney subreddit the place the Pope pictures have been posted has examples of different, equally convincing AI-generated pictures produced by its 143,000 members. They embrace a collection of pictures documenting a fictional earthquake that hit the US and Canada in 2001 that has impressed its personal lore. The top-voted touch upon the put up reads: “People in 2025 are going to have a real difficult time with misinformation. People in 2100 won’t know which parts of history were real…”

“I think the fact that so many people can now access it – in a way it is more democratic – means that, in a way, the floodgates have opened,” says Venema. “The more realistic it gets and the more people gain access, the more careful we should be and the more risk there is of someone acting on this type of deception.”

Ultimately, the speedy rise of AI means some disruption is inevitable. Carmi says we’re being anticipated to hop on board the AI revolution with out absolutely greedy its influence – that means we want higher media literacy of how simple it’s to create and unfold faux pictures. “Most of our society has been left behind, not understanding how these technologies work, for what purposes and what are the consequences of that,” she says.