Artificial Intelligence Takes Over Vatican: Meet the “Modern” Pope

Over the past few days, the networks have been flooded with images of Pope Francis wearing an elegant white coat and Trump being arrested by brute force. Many have commented on them and analyzed them up and down, but there’s a problem: the images are fake. The ones of the Pope were created through Midjourney, the famous generative model.

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The images of the Pope were spread on Reddit and the truth is that it has managed to fool many. The photograph shows Pope Francis wearing a coat that could well be worn by any of the Kardashian clan and it certainly looked very convincing. The user decided to upload the image to Twitter and after that, thousands of accounts echoed the modern Pope.

The threat of fakes made through artificial intelligence is not new, but the ability of technology to produce increasingly convincing images is very worrying. As more people have access to these fake images, there is a risk that they will be mistaken for the truth.

The line between reality and fiction is becoming increasingly blurred and generative artificial intelligences are contributing to this. In this case, the image of the Pope has been one of the most credible hoaxes and with good reason: Pope Francis has projected a much more progressive and current image than his predecessors, something that has made images like the one with the coat not difficult to believe. Another great help has been, in this case, Midjourney, one of the most capable models when it comes to generating credible results (although the hands are still his weak point).

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Midjourney has been in the testing phase since July 2022 and has gradually found its place among other big names in the world such as Stable Diffusion and DALL-E 2. And it’s not just about the Pope: we recently talked about the problem with the photos of Trump being “arrested”. The creator of the snapshots, Eliot Higgins (founder of Bellingcat) claimed that he got the idea from Trump himself. The former U.S. president feared he would be arrested for allegedly bribing a porn actress he allegedly harassed.

Another of the deepfakes that has made its way around the world was that of Vladimir Putin kneeling before Xi Jinping, the president of China. The image flooded Twitter and many believed it, but as on other occasions, it turned out to be false.

The meteoric rise of AIs also means that some disruption is inevitable. In the absence of regulation, it is important for society to understand how these technologies work and what the consequences of misuse can be.

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