The internet has lately been awash with fake -AI generated images of the Pope that went viral. A picture of the pope wearing what can only be described as a swagged-out puffy jacket and looking like a modern GenZ Pope. With several hashtags being used like; The vicar of drip, Supreme pontiff, and the Balenciaga bishop. This begs to ask the question, what is real on the internet?
The pope’s fake AI pictures seem to have been first posted online on Friday last week, submitted to a subreddit for the AI image generator Midjourney. Over the weekend, it spread on Twitter and other social networks, first as a meme and then as the subject of debunking.
When I spoke to a friend, she thought the pope’s puffer jacket images were real, and am sure most of you reading this article would think the same. Many were not giving the images a second thought. Are we ready to survive the future of technology?
These are definitely fake-AI images. Not only was it posted to Reddit alongside three alternatives (Midjourney usually generates four images in response to each prompt) but it also contains some hidden signs of AI generation, including a number of areas where details are conspicuously smeared. So how can we spot these signs of AI generation?
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There’s the not-quite hand not quite grasping a not-quite coffee cup; a crucifix without proper right angles that depicts Jesus as if he’d been sculpted in clay and sat on; and the edge of a glasses lens that somehow transitions into its own shadow — all indicative of AI generation: products of a system that knows the surface of reality but not the underlying rules that govern how physical objects interact.
To highlight all these out seems like dogmatism because the image undeniably looks real — for a certain definition of real, anyway. If you scrolled past it in your feed over the weekend, you probably didn’t give it a second thought, just like most of the content we consume online.
It lead me to ask, why in particular this fake-AI image went viral, as it reveals a lot about how AI fakes will be shared and spread in the coming months. In simple terms, the image went viral because it represents a particular alignment of subject and aesthetic — it works as a fake precisely because it matches the ways we already consume images today. As humans, we have developed behavioral patterns in how we consume online content.
The Pope as the Subject: There is something emotive about the Pope in the hearts of many, so his images would give a lot of credentials to the fake-AI image. Due to the subject in the image, many people have been fooled (myself initially included) the pope is known for wearing stylish clothes, and images of him often go viral because of this. Just as importantly, though, the fact that the pope is a celebrity makes unbelievable images of him inherently more believable.
Fashion: “The pope, in summary, does not wear Prada, but Christ” was the official rebuttal from Rome. The association between the Vitor of Rome and Italian fashion is so strong that the Vatican was forced to debunk rumors that the pope wears designer loafers.
Hyperrealism: In the context of AI images this is an aesthetic defined by perfect lighting and glossy surfaces, by dramatic poses, and saturated colors. It’s stylized and exaggerated — the sort of image we already associate with celebrities, whose likenesses are reproduced with such abundance and deliberation that they often already look fake.
These factors together explain why certain AI images have gone viral recently. This is both scary and reassuring — reassuring because it suggests there is currently a limit to what AI fakes are believable but scary because this technology is moving too fast for any current reassurances to hold true for long.
