A photo of Pope Francis looking dapper in a white puffer jacket went mega-viral on social media over the weekend. It turned out the 86-year-old seated pontiff had some serious drops. But there was just one problem: the image wasn’t real. It was made using AI art tool Midjourney.
As word spread online that the image was generated by AI, many expressed surprise. “I thought the Pope’s puffer jacket was real and didn’t give it a second thought,” Chrissy Teigen tweeted on the spot. “No way am I living the future of technology.” Garbage Day columnist and former BuzzFeed News reporter Ryan Broderick called it “the first real case of mass AI disinformation,” following hot on the heels of fake images of Donald Trump being arrested by police in New York last week.
Now, for the first time, the creator of the image has shared the story of how he generated the photograph that fooled the world.
Pablo Xavier, a 31-year-old construction worker from the Chicago area who declined to share his last name out of fear he might be attacked for creating the images, said he was wandering around on shrooms last week when he came up with the idea for the image.
“I try to figure out ways to make something funny, because that’s what I usually try to do,” he told BuzzFeed News. “I try to do funny things or trippy art — psychedelic things. It just started to dawn on me: I should do the Pope. Then it just came like water: ‘The Pope in a Balenciaga puffer coat, Moncler, walking the streets of Rome, in Paris,’ things like that.”
He generated the first three images around 2 p.m. last Friday. (He first started using Midjourney after one of his brothers died in November. “It pretty much just started with that, just dealing with grief and making images of my previous brother,” he said. “I fell in love with it after that.”)
When Pablo Xavier first saw the pope’s pictures, he said, “I think they’re perfect.” So he posted them to a Facebook group called AI Art Universe and then Reddit. He was shocked when the pictures quickly went viral. “I was just blown away,” he said. “I didn’t want it to blow up like that.”
