It happened to me: I thought the image of the pope in a big coat was real. Here’s my first excuse: I don’t really know much about popes. His holiness can be out there doing his things, and I can be over here doing mine, and our ecosystems never really cross. I think I just idly assumed: this one is the cool pope, right? We had the really popey pope, and then the German pope who looked a bit like he might be in Star Wars, and now we have the cool pope. Right? He’s always doing tweets and saying something very slightly liberal. He’s cool! So I thought wearing a really big coat and looking like a Metal Gear Solid 2 boss battle might have been part of his ongoing cool guy shtick. Lord, forgive me.
As it turns out, the image of the pope in a big coat, which was doing the rounds on social media this weekend, was generated by AI. The i reliably informs me that it was created using a program called Midjourney and was seemingly first shared on a Reddit page dedicated to AI art, before going viral on Twitter.
This was shocking for me, because as someone who is 35 and self-identifies as “too online”, I thought I was above being hoodwinked in this way. I have lived through every era of the internet: really slow Jpeg downloads, not clicking links in case they were a Rick Astley video, staring deep into the maw of goatse, flash games where you beat up Osama bin Laden, “Star Wars kid”, apologetic crowdfunding to say sorry to “Star Wars kid”, making friends with an American guy on a forum, really seriously playing Farmville, following Stephen Fry on Twitter, having an opinion about The Dress, and actually posting photos of my meals on Instagram with a big heavy-handed Sierra filter over the top of it.
Now we’re in the bland bit of internet before the supposed advent of web 3.0 – Facebook is basically an inaccurate local newspaper, Twitter is a big fight, and everything else is just Accept Cookies?, pop-ups and the first 100 words of a Substack – and I thought I knew my way around. So it has shocked me quite fundamentally to be pranked by an AI version of the pope.
Here’s the thing: I actually wondered, “Is this image AI?” when I first saw it. I pinched and zoomed in. I checked the hands (like all young artists, AI struggles with hands). They looked normal and real. He seemed to be carrying a small sack of what I assumed was “Pope Salts”, and I thought that detail was too textured for what AI was doing. But I still put it on Instagram and said it was “cool” anyway. It was only last year we were all playing with the smudgy, strange art generated by Dall-E, and since that time the ability of these AI-powered tools seems to have leapt forwards.
There are already jokey AI-generated videos of President Biden and Justin Bieber (two equally important cultural icons), and though they are just a degree or two off convincing right now, give it two weeks. Coat Pope is fun for now, but it only takes an AI-generated video of him saying, “Dogs go to heaven, cats go to hell” and very real fights could break out.
I suppose this is a turning point, then: the moment “generation internet” finally got conned online. I now have sympathy for older people who are seemingly so easily manipulated by a shonky Photoshop edit or a comment thread that makes them go and attack a 5G tower. For years I’ve smirked and laughed at those who have been fed misinformation online – imagine believing a lie! – and now Coat Pope has done the same to me.
I’m going to take a page out of the pope’s book, and say something absolute and moral: we really need to make “being sceptical of things by default” cool again, or else we’re going to be in a whole mess of trouble.
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Joel Golby is a writer for the Guardian and Vice, and the author of Brilliant, Brilliant, Brilliant Brilliant Brilliant
