Why Pope Francis is the star of AI-generated photos

Pope Francis wears a long white Balenciaga-inspired down jacket. Francis rocks planes and revs a motorcycle on a busy street. Francis turns the tables on a gritty nightclub. Francis in a tactical vest prepares to fly a fighter jet. Francis over a beer at Burning Man.

Dozens of photos have surfaced in recent weeks showing the leader of the world’s Roman Catholics in strange scenarios, sending social media into an uproar. Apart from the Pope himself, all the images have something in common: they are fake, made by Artificial Intelligence tools who create images from short text prompts.

Many public figures – including basketball star LeBron James and various real-life housewives – have appeared in AI-generated imagery lately, but the images featuring Francis have garnered the most attention. They’ve garnered more views, likes and comments than many other AI photos, according to a New York Times review, prompting a race to portray the 86-year-old in increasingly weird situations.

“I had to get involved with the Pope thing,” one Reddit user recently wrote alongside AI images of Francis practicing martial arts, playing basketball and skateboarding. “Jumping on the Pope’s bandwagon,” said another, sharing a picture of the Pope addressing a crowd of bikers.

The proliferation of Francis in AI-generated imagery is the result of a perfect storm of factors, religion experts said. After 10 years As the head of the Catholic Church, he is instantly recognizable around the world. Considered a more approachable leader than his tougher predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI. And combined with a sudden interest in new AI tools, Francis – who in real life is often pictured in formal settings – became the recurring choice of developers to place in the most inopportune scenarios.

The goal, some creators said, was to show that even the Pope can kick back, be daredevil, and have fun.

Global religious figures like the pope are natural subjects of political satire and artistic expression, said Jennifer Herdt, professor of Christian ethics at Yale Divinity School. Francis is ideal, she added, because he’s “known for his simplicity, his solidarity with the poorest of the poor,” so when he’s the subject of crazy scenarios like flying a fighter jet, “it’s definitely the pinnacle of incongruity to face the.” to defy expectations.”

AI images can be dangerous if people believe them to be real and misuse them to spread misinformation. “They lure people into not checking,” said Subbarao Kambhampati, a computer science professor at Arizona State University. “Then you move away from reality bit by bit.”

But many of the AI ​​images featuring Francis have drawn a chuckle of affection from the Pope, who has recently had a health boost and is deep in a longer than average papacy.

“People experience Pope Francis as a pope of the people, so you would enjoy taking him to all these places where the people are,” said Rev. Serene Jones, the president and professor of religion and democracy at Union Theological Seminary in NYC.

The Vatican did not respond to a request for comment on the Pope’s AI-generated fame.

The image that made Francis an AI star shows him walking down the street in a white down jacket inspired by Balenciaga, a French high fashion house. It appeared to have first appeared on a Reddit forum for the generative AI tool on March 24th Occasionally and then shared via social media.

A tweet sharing the image — with the caption, “Brooklyn boys could only hope for this level of drip” — has been liked more than 229,000 times and viewed 20.6 million times. In contrast, a tweet sharing AI-generated images of former President Donald J. Trump’s arrest received 40,000 likes and 6.4 million views.

Midjourney, which released version 5 of its imaging tool last month, did not respond to a request for comment. The tool generates custom, hyper-realistic images from just a few words and can now create hands with the right number of fingers, which used to be a hindrance to credibility.

Since then, Francis has become an AI muse. He’s been shown eating fast food, meeting aliens, playing guitar at Glastonbury Festival, scuba diving, dancing on the beach and cleaning up biohazardous waste while wearing a hazmat suit. The flood of papal imagery has been so extensive that some people on online generative AI forums have done so asked for creators to use a different inspiration.

That didn’t stop the depictions of an increasingly extravagantly dressed Francis. In some pictures he has gone from a down jacket to an all black outfit with a leather jacket. In another, he wears a rainbow trench coat.

These prompted others to put Francis in one of the people’s outfits: a sweatshirt, sweatpants, and dad sneakers.