During the weekend, a photo of Pope Francis in search of a Dapper in a white puffy jacket became mega-viral on social networks. The 86-year-old seated pontiff, it seems, has a serious drop. But there was only one problem: the image is not real. It was made using the AI Midjourney art tool.
While the word has spread on the internet that the image was generated by AI, many expressed their surprise. “I thought that the Pope’s puffy jacket was real and I did not think of a second reflection”, Chrissy Teigen tweeted. “I do not survive in the future of technology.” Garbage day Newsletter writer and former Buzzfeed News Ryan Broderick journalist called that “The first real case of disinformation of mass level AI”, following hot on the heels of Donald Trump’s fake images are arrested by police in New York last week.
Now, for the first time, the creator of the image shared the story of the way he generated the photography that deceived the world.
Pablo Xavier, a 31 -year -old construction worker from the Chicago region who refused to share his last name to fear that he could not be attacked for creating the images, said that he was stumbled the mushrooms last week when he had the idea of the image.
“I try to find ways to make something funny because that’s what I usually try to do,” he told Buzzfeed News. “I try to do funny stuff or tripping art – psychedelic things. It just took me: I should do the pope. Then it came like water: “The Pope at Balenciaga Buffy Coat, Moncler, Walking The Streets of Rome, Paris”.
He generated the first three images around 2 p.m. local time last Friday. (He first started using Midjourney after one of his brothers died in November. “It started almost everything with it, facing a grief and images from my former brother,” he said. “I fell in love with her after that.”)
When Pablo Xavier saw the Pope’s images for the first time, he said: “I thought they were perfect.” He therefore published them on a Facebook group called AI Art Universe, then on Reddit. It was shocked when the images quickly became viral. “I’m just blown away,” he said. “I didn’t want it to explode like that.”
