Pope Francis wears a long white puffer jacket inspired by Balenciaga. Francis rocks aviators and tours a busy street on a motorcycle. Francis turns the tables on a dim nightclub. Francis in a tactical vest, prepares to fly a fighter jet. Francis shares 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 a frenzy. Aside from the pope himself, the images all have something in common: they’re fake, created by artificial intelligence tools that create images of short text prompts.
Many public figures — including basketball star LeBron James and several Real Housewives — have recently popped up in AI-generated photos, but the images featuring Francis have made the biggest impression. According to a review from The New York Times, they’ve received more views, likes and comments than many other AI photos, sparking a race to portray the 86-year-old in increasingly strange situations.
“I had to get involved in the pope thing,” one Reddit user recently wrote alongside AI images of Francis practicing martial arts, basketball, and skateboarding. “Hop on the pope’s bandwagon,” said another, sharing a photo of the pope addressing a crowd of motorcyclists.
The prevalence of Francis in AI-generated images is the result of a perfect storm of factors, religious experts said. After 10 years as head of the Catholic Church, he is instantly recognizable around the world. He is seen as a more approachable leader than his tougher predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI. And coupled with a sudden burst of interest in new AI tools, Francis — who is often depicted in formal settings in real life — became the recurring choice of creators to place in the most incongruous of scenarios.
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The goal, some creators said, was to show that even the Pope can sit back, be a daredevil and have fun.
Global religious figures like the pope are natural subjects of political satire and artistic expression, said Jennifer Herdt, a professor of Christian ethics at Yale Divinity School. Francis is ideal, she added, because he is “known for his simplicity, his solidarity with the poorest of the poor”, so when he is the subject of distant scenarios, such as piloting a fighter jet, “it is absolutely the height of incongruity , of defying expectations.”
AI images can be dangerous if people think they are real and misuse them to spread misinformation. “You lull people into not double-checking,” said Subbarao Kambhampati, a computer science professor at Arizona State University. “Then you gradually become displaced from reality.”
But many of the AI images featuring Francis have elicited affection for the pope, who recently had a health crisis and is deep in a longer-than-average papacy.
“People perceive Pope Francis as a pope of the people, so you would like to put him in all these places where the people are,” said Rev. Serene Jones, the president and professor of religion and democracy at Union Theological Seminary in New York. York.
The Vatican did not respond to a request for comment about the pope’s AI-generated fame.
The image that made Francis an AI star shows him in a white puffer jacket in the style of Balenciaga, a haute French fashion house, striding down the street. It appeared to have been first posted on March 24 on a Reddit forum for the generative AI tool Midjourney and then shared across social media.
A tweet sharing the image – titled “The guys in Brooklyn could only hope for this trickle level” – was liked more than 229,000 times and viewed 20.6 million times. In contrast, a tweet featuring AI-generated images of the arrest of former President Donald J. Trump received 40,000 likes and 6.4 million views.
Midjourney, which released version 5 of its image generation 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 correct number of fingers, a previous barrier to credibility.
Since then, Francis has become an AI muse. He has been shown eating fast food, encountering aliens, playing guitar at the Glastonbury Festival, diving, dancing on the beach, and cleaning up biohazardous waste in a hazmat suit. The stream of papal images is so voluminous that some people in online generative AI forums have begged the creators to use another source of inspiration.
That hasn’t stopped images of an increasingly strangely dressed Francis. In some images, he has transitioned from a puffer jacket to an all black outfit with a leather jacket. In another, he wears a raincoat in rainbow colors.
That prompted others to put Francis in a popular outfit: a sweatshirt, sweatpants, and daddy sneakers.
