An AI-generated ‘Balenciaga pope’ fooled us all. How much does it matter?
The viral image of Pope Francis in a puffy white coat points to our AI future — for better or worse
Look: The pope’s clothes are almost always interesting. They’re either surreal because they’re arcane and generically holy (an old man traverses the world wearing a long robe and matching hat, like Gandalf) or because they’re startlingly contemporary (the same old man
also wears a Swatch watch). The very fact that his daily clothes and accoutrements have to be in keeping with sacred tradition can fascinate, too. His leather loafers
should be red like martyrs’ blood;
the car he rides is often specially modified for him to stand up to greet the faithful who gather to see him.
So when a photo surfaced this weekend, just before the fifth Sunday of Lent, of Pope Francis in a long, white, trendy-looking puffer coat with his traditional pectoral cross and white zucchetto cap, it’s not hard to imagine what happened next: People went wild. “OKAAYYY,”
wrote one Twitter user who shared the image. “Ayo. Blessed be,”
wrote another. This particular puffer — gargantuan and gleaming, with a cinched waist and imposing oversize hood — landed in that slim Venn diagram sweet spot between “what the pope might actually, practically wear to keep warm on a cold day” and “what the wealthiest 26-year-olds are currently wearing around SoHo.”
The image was completely fake. According to
the fact-checking website Snopes, the image was created using the generative AI program Midjourney and later appeared on the subreddit r/Midjourney.
The coat, for anyone looking to Steal the Pontiff’s Look, resembles Balenciaga’s $3,550
Long CB Down Jacket for women as well as Rick Owens’s some $3,000
Duvet Jumbo Peter Coat. Both are black, but one has to imagine that the designers,
like the auto manufacturers who make each new popemobile, might allow a few custom modifications if it were Il Papa asking. The fake coat fooled a lot of people — and it fooled a lot of people in the same week that saw
fake, AI-generated images of cops accosting former president Donald Trump. Yes, suddenly it seems all too obvious how artificial intelligence could easily be used to create propaganda, how it could easily be weaponized as a tool of destabilization.
But, that said: The Pope Coat Incident makes clear that AI can and will also be used for the equivalent of making hyper-realistic cartoons. For dreaming up fantasy fashion statements, combining any given celebrity with any given clothing ensemble like an infinite set of paper dolls. For creating the photographic equivalent of fanfic.
It may have been one of the first true mass AI misinformation events, in other words, but the puffer-pope saga was also … pretty low-stakes.
The Popecoat, then, arrived at a moment of clear and justifiable alarm over AI-generated imagery, and when
its realism had advanced perceptibly even from their capabilities a matter of weeks ago. “The meme likely went viral because of the uncertainty about whether it was real or fake,” said Arvind Narayanan, a professor of computer science at Princeton University who studies AI. Because many more people have access to this kind of technology, it will be important for social media platforms such as Twitter, Instagram and Reddit to develop better tools to quickly label misinformation, he said. “It goes without saying that we can never again assume an image is authentic because it looks realistic.”
Deepfakes have certainly fooled people before: a fake
“drunk” Nancy Pelosi video in 2019, a
Mark Zuckerberg “announcement” about Facebook ads, also in 2019. But the dripped-out pope,
created by a 31-year-old Chicago construction worker who came up with the idea while on shrooms, is a reminder that not everything created by AI is made with the intent to pass itself off as authentic. (“I just thought it was funny to see the pope in a funny jacket,” the construction worker told BuzzFeed.) There’s a word, after all, for the depiction of things that aren’t necessarily real: art.
