Why Pope Francis is the star of AI-generated photos – 04/10/2023 – Market

Pope Francis wearing a long white Balenciaga-inspired jacket. Francisco in glasses and aviator jacket and accelerating a motorbike in a busy street. Francisco turning the tables in a dark nightclub. Francisco in a tactical vest, preparing to fly a fighter jet. Francisco having a beer at the Burning Man counterculture event.

In recent weeks, dozens of photos have appeared showing the world leader of Catholics in strange settings, leaving social media in confusion. In addition to the pontiff himself, all images have something in common: they are fake, made by artificial intelligence tools that create images from brief text commands.

Many public figures – including basketball star LeBron James and several real housewives – have appeared in AI-generated images recently, but the photos with Francis made the biggest impact. They got more views, likes and comments than many other AI photos, according to an analysis by The New York Times, leading to a rush to portray the 86-year-old in increasingly outlandish situations.

“I had to get involved with the pope thing,” one Reddit user recently wrote alongside AI footage of Francis practicing martial arts, playing basketball and skateboarding. “Jumping on the pope’s bandwagon,” said another, who shared an image of the pope speaking to a crowd of motorcyclists.

Francis’ prevalence in AI-generated images is the result of a perfect storm of factors, religious experts said. After ten years as head of the Catholic Church, he is instantly recognized around the world. He is considered a more approachable leader than his hard-line predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI. And when combined with a sudden burst of interest in new AI tools, Francis – who in real life is often portrayed in formal settings – has become the recurring choice of creators to put in the most unlikely scenarios.

The aim, some creators said, is to show that even the pope can relax, be a rebel 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 “is known for his simplicity, his solidarity with the poorest of the poor.” So when he’s the subject of wacky stories like flying a fighter jet, “it’s definitely the height of incongruity, of defying expectations.”

AI images can be dangerous if people believe they are real and misuse them to spread misinformation. “You trick people into not double-checking,” said Subbarao Kambhampati, a professor of computer science at Arizona State University. “So you are displaced bit by bit from reality.”

But many AI images of Francis have elicited affectionate laughter from the pope, who has recently had a health problem and is in a longer-than-average papacy.

“People see Francis as a pope of the people, so you’d want to put him in all these places where people are,” said the Rev. Serene Jones, president and professor of religion and democracy at Union Theological Seminary in New York.

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

The image that turned Francis into an AI star shows him wearing a white jacket in the style of Balenciaga, a French high fashion house, walking down the street. It looks like it was first posted on March 24th on a Reddit forum for generative AI tool Midjourney and then shared on social media.

A tweet sharing the image — captioned “Brooklyn boys could only hope for this level of attitude” — has been liked more than 229,000 times and viewed 20.6 million times. By contrast, a tweet sharing AI-generated footage of former President Donald Trump’s arrest got 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 with just a few words, and can now create hands with the correct number of fingers, a former barrier to credibility.

Since then, Francisco has become an AI muse. He has been shown eating fast food, meeting aliens, playing guitar at the Glastonbury Festival, scuba diving, dancing on the beach, and cleaning up biohazard waste in a hazmat suit. The flood of papal images has been so voluminous that some people on generative AI forums online have begged creators to use other inspiration.

That hasn’t stopped depictions of Francis dressed more and more oddly. In some images, he has gone from a padded jacket to an all-black outfit with a leather jacket. In another, he wears a rainbow coat.

That led others to put Francis in a popular outfit: a sweatshirt and sweatpants and “Daddy’s” sneakers.

Translated by Luiz Roberto M. Gonçalves