Puffer coat created with AI image generator Midjourney.Midjourney / Reddit
Have you seen the photo of Pope Francis wearing a giant white puffer coat? It has gone viral on social media platforms like Reddit and Twitter in the past few days. But it’s completely fake.
The image was created using Midjourney, an artificial intelligence tool capable of generating amazingly realistic fake images. The image was then shared on Reddit before it took to Twitter over the weekend, where most people seemed to believe it was real.
Recently, Midjourney was used to create photorealistic images of former President Donald Trump’s arrest. And Trump even shared a fake AI-generated image of himself kneeling to pray. At first glance, the images all look like they could be real photos. But they are all computer generated counterfeits of reality.
As internet sleuths have found when debunking these types of photorealistic creations, one of the easiest ways to tell if an image was generated by AI is by looking at the hands. Midjourney has tremendous difficulty generating hands and this picture of the Pope is no different – however, it seems like a safe bet that this won’t be the case forever.
Midjourney, which doesn’t look quite right. Midjourney/Reddit
The fake Pope image fooled many, including far-right influencer Ian Miles Cheong, who tweeted: “The Pope is a fashion icon. Respect the drip.”
“What would Pope Francis’ lifestyle brand be called?” tweeted Don Moynihan, a professor in Georgetown.
Moynihan included two more photos of the Pope, both of which are real.
These AI image generators, which also include OpenAI’s DALL-E and Stable Diffusion, allow anyone to easily describe the image they want to see with text. The images can be created because the tools have been trained on literally millions of images from around the web, many of which are copyrighted images. And it’s the latter part that has prompted lawsuits from companies like Getty Images, arguing that their intellectual property is being infringed upon.
Getty may have a case, as documents filed with court show that Stable Diffusion’s image generator sometimes even includes a crude element that looks like Getty’s watermark. There’s no denying what these new super powerful software programs have been looking at to create their images.
Images in his lawsuit against the creator of Stable Diffusion.UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE DISTRICT OF DELAWARE
The US Copyright Office recently announced that images created by AI cannot be copyrighted, an interesting development for people who want to use these images in books and magazines.
The world of AI-generated imagery is relatively new, with companies only opening their tools to the public in the last four months. But fake photos have been around since the invention of photography, and only time will tell if these new AI programs will generate more disinformation and misinformation than Adobe Photoshop allows.
While Photoshop requires some real skill to create a convincing fake, now anyone can type any text prompt into Midjourney and instantly see their creation come to life. And with the 2024 presidential election just around the corner – which will unfortunately also include an anti-democratic former president who loves fake photos – things could get messy very quickly.
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I’m a technology reporter and the founder of Paleofuture.com, a website I started in 2007 that looks at past visions of the future, from flying cars and jetpacks to utopias and dystopias. Paleofuture was formerly hosted by Smithsonian Magazine (2011-2013) and Gizmodo (2013-2020).
My work has appeared on BBC Future, Slate, The Verge, GOOD, Pacific Standard, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic and Buzzfeed. Most recently, I was a senior writer at Gizmodo for ten years. I have also spoken at South by Southwest, dConstruct in Brighton, The Conference in Malmö, UCLA’s Digital Cash Conference in Los Angeles, and the University of Virginia’s edUi Conference. In 2012, I teamed up with the BBC to host an exhibition of retro-futuristic items from my personal collection in Hollywood, California.
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