Over the weekend, a photo of Pope Francis looking dapper in a white puffer jacket went mega-viral on social media. The 86-year-old incumbent pontiff appears to be in serious trouble. But there was just one problem: the image wasn't real. It was created using the artificial intelligence tool Midjourney.
When word spread online that the image was created by artificial intelligence, many expressed surprise. “I thought the Pope’s down jacket was real and didn’t think much about it,” Chrissy Teigen tweeted. “There is no way I will survive the future of technology.” Garbage Day newsletter writer and former BuzzFeed News reporter Ryan Broderick called it “the first real case of AI misinformation at a mass level”, hot on the heels of fake images of Donald Trump being arrested police in New York last week.
Now, for the first time, the creator of the image has shared the story of how he created the photo that deceived the world.
Pablo Xavier, a 31-year-old Chicago-area construction worker who declined to give his last name for fear he might be attacked for creating the images, said he tripped over mushrooms last week when he came up with the idea for the image.
“I'm trying to figure out how to do something funny because that's what I usually try to do,” he told BuzzFeed News. “I'm trying to make fun things or trippy art – psychedelic things. It just dawned on me: I have to do a Pope. Then it just flowed like water: 'The Pope in a Balenciaga, Moncler down coat, walking the streets of Rome, Paris' and stuff like that.”
He created the first three images around 14:00 local time last Friday. (He first started using Midjourney after one of his brothers died in November. “It pretty much started from there, just dealing with grief and creating images of my past brother,” he said. “I fell in love with it after that.”)
When Pablo Xavier first saw 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. “I was just shocked,” he said. “I didn't mean for it to blow up like that.”
