This weekend, we may have seen the first big artificial intelligence misinformation moment — featuring the pope and a puffer jacket.
An image allegedly showing a swagged-out Pope Francis in a designer coat went viral Saturday. It was actually created with the AI image generator Midjourney and posted to Reddit. I was fooled. As was Chrissy Teigen and nearly half of the 240,000 users polled by science influencer Hank Green.
A quick glance at the image reveals the telltale sign of AI: Digitally mangled hands. But I scrolled right past, later mentioning the pope’s Balenciaga drip to my wife.
Last week, similarly-created images of Donald Trump being arrested also went viral — though failed to fool the same volume of people. Why? Should we be scared of a new flood of AI misinformation making it impossible to separate fact from fiction online?
Not really. Here’s why I think so many people fell for the Balenciaga pope:
- The pope is usually pretty swagged out. I didn’t think twice, nor did I think the puffer was that weird in context.
- The stakes are low: There’s not much harm in sharing a fake photo of a pope’s fit. What’s the point of taking the extra second to zoom in on a harmless pic of the pope?
- It’s apolitical: If you’ve ever used Community Notes on Twitter, you know that the second someone tweets something misleading about a politician, folks from the other side of the aisle will flood the platform with fact checks. We didn’t see the immediate backlash that political misinformation elicits.
The latter two points inform my thinking about the whole ordeal: We’re still some time from a large-scale, harmful AI misinformation event. Something that measurably disrupts real life. Fact-checkers and journalists, in my opinion, are ready for such a scenario.
As I mentioned in a misinformation workshop I led Monday, conspiracy theories, out-of-context videos and stupid memes are still much more of a threat to the information ecosystem.
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Interesting piece, but I’m not sure how to square the idea of a pope, any pope, being apolitical. and the messaging of the luxury jacket, were it to be taken as real, would directly impact the politics of the papacy.
But we are in the early days of all this yet.