The strange case of pope fashion – 03/30/2023 – Education

If you browsed the internet last weekend, chances are you saw an image of Pope Francis wearing an oversized white jacket and sneakers with gold accents. The style and gestures, more characteristic of a rapper on the night of the Grammys than of the pontiff on his morning walk, drew so much attention that even a major fashion vehicle reproduced the photo, citing the stylist who would have assembled the look. It was, indeed, an improbable sight – so improbable that it never existed.

The imaginary scene was created in the Midjourney application, which generates images from text commands, and published by its creator on the social network Reddit. And then it went viral.

It’s what we’ve been calling it up until now. deep fake –a photo or video simulation, generated with the help of artificial intelligence, so realistic that it can lead many people to think that it actually happened. But the popularization of generative AI tools, adopted by talented creators and curious people in general, and the proliferation of this type of image on networks have made this classification more complex.

It is not just about pointing out what is false and what is true – which would be difficult enough in some cases. Some other questions arise: can what is not claimed to be real be called fake? Did the image become false when it was published in the media as being true? Is “artificial” always the same as “fake”? And if it were in a gallery, not on the internet, would we have a more accurate indication of its creative nature? Would the same image of the pope, if executed in ink and not digital media and hyper realistic style, go from deep fake to art?

After all, it seems, the boundary between illustration and lie depends as much on the context and the author’s intentions as on the critical reading skills of the person who sees the image. Or the journalist who publishes it.

Conceptual dilemmas aside, the possibility of generating “realities” that never existed, when used with bad intentions, changes the panorama of misinformation and can inflame conflict situations. Images convey a greater degree of reliability, as we tend to believe what our eyes see.

The recent fictional footage showing former President Donald Trump being arrested by the police, for example, indicates the potential this technology has to spread misinformation and incite polarization and violence. At the moment it is still possible to examine the images generated by AIs and notice some of the aberrations they create – usually poorly finished hands, deformations, distorted perspectives and other noises that in technical jargon are called “hallucinations”. But tools tend to evolve quickly and soon it will no longer be possible to identify these artificial images by their mistakes.

The new challenge leads us to reaffirm the need to promote old skills: visual literacy has long been an imperative need in a highly image-oriented society. The images that are everywhere influence our perception of facts, reflect or denounce power structures and can even change the course of history.

To read them properly, we need to understand the context in which they were produced, the author’s intention, the aesthetic and editorial choices made or even which groups or realities are highlighted or omitted. To investigate their reliability, it is necessary to activate not only checking tools but above all our own critical sense, noticing when they cause us strangeness or activate our emotions.

The common reader, even the youngest, needs to know that our social and technological context allows the creation and circulation of “artificial realities”; he needs to develop the discernment to identify them and recognize which are and which are not harmful. We need to get used to always asking: “What does this image want from me?”

In short, in the face of the ever-increasing challenges of the information environment, we have to remember that the best line of defense is our own common sense and capacity for reflection.