An image of Pope Francis donning a huge white puffer jacket with a cross hanging from it has sent social media users into a frenzy.
The photo is said to have been created using an AI (artificial intelligence) image generator called Midjourney.
The image shows Pope Francis, 86, wearing the flashy item over the top of his robes, along with a traditional white scull cap.
The image was outrageous enough to prompt Chrissy Teigen, 37, to address her 12.9 million Twitter followers.
The model and TV personality wrote: ‘I thought the pope’s puffer jacket was real and didnt give it a second thought. no way am I surviving the future of technology’.
The photo is said to have been created using an AI-generated AI (artificial intelligence) image generator called Midjourney
Other social media users were also quick to chime in.
One TikTok user commented: ‘Christian Dior’.
Another wrote: ‘The father the son and the holy drip’.
A third posted: ‘They see him rolling, they prayin’.’
‘The fact people find a picture of the Pope in a long puffy jacket thrilling is a good indicator AI is going to have a really easy time destroying humanity,’ another person posted on social media.
The picture seems to have been first posted online on Friday, submitted to a subreddit for the AI image generator Midjourney, according to technology news website The Verge.
Midjourney is an independent research lab that explores ‘new mediums of thought and expanding the imaginative powers of the human species,’ according to its website.
Pope Francis (file photo). The image of the Pope in a puffer jacket seems to have been first posted online on Friday
As some on social media questioned whether the image could have been Photoshopped, The Verge points out that it has all the telltale signs of AI generation, including ‘the edge of a glasses lens that somehow transitions into its own shadow’.
Midjourney’s AI-based technology allows it to create images from simple text prompts.
Over the past year, there has been a surge in text-to-image generators amid the broader rise of generative artificial intelligence, which backs software that creates texts, sounds or images based on data it is fed.
Using the technology users enter prompts, from simple tasks, such as drawing a dog, to the absurd, such as rendering an object in a setting or form that it would not normally appear in.
The software then generates the image in the form of a realistic photo or professional painting.
One person posted on social media: ‘The fact people find a picture of the Pope in a long puffy jacket thrilling is a good indicator AI is going to have a really easy time destroying humanity’
The technology takes in billions of images from across the internet, identifying patterns between the photograph and text words that accompany them.
AI experts say that re-creating hands is a problem for the software, as it has not yet been able to fully understand what the word ‘hand’ means, making the body part difficult to render. This leads to it coming out slightly abnormal in the finished version.
Fake images created by artificial intelligence tools depicting former president Donald Trump have appeared on social media over the past week.
Many falsely showed the arrest of the former president, who predicted that he may be arrested over his alleged payment of hush money to porn star Stormy Daniels.
On Thursday, Trump shared an AI-generated image on his own social media platform Truth Social, showing him kneeling in prayer.
As police in New York City and Washington DC prepared for possible unrest in the event of Donald Trump being indicted over allegations he paid hush money to Stormy Daniels, images emerged appearing to show the former president being arrested
One of the fake images showed Trump’s wife Melania screaming after his arrest
Many of the images of Trump posted online had the appearance of staged artistic shots rather than real-life photographs.
Scenes depicting Trump being tackled to the ground by police officers were created using AI technology by Bellingcat journalist Eliot Higgins.
Some of the fake images showed Trump being chased down the street by police officers while his wife Melania screamed.
Others showed the former president in prison wearing an orange jumpsuit.
The sequence of images was created using Midjourney v5 artificial intelligence image generators.
