No, the Pope doesn’t have a coat straight out of a Balenciaga fashion show. The photos of the Pope that have gone viral over the weekend have been generated by a Artificial intelligence that you can use yourself since it is completely free. Yes, we are talking about the generative AI of images known as Midjourney.
Using Midjourney is very simple and, in fact, we have a tutorial with which you can start using Midjourney to create photos of the Pope to your liking. Going back to the one baptized as “The Balenciaga Pope” on Reddit, the images have gone around the world and, above all, have gained popularity in Twitter.
In fact, it was thanks to a user posting the photos on Twitter that they went viral and, unfortunately, many people believed they were real. The truth is that it is perfectly understandable, in fact, the latest version of Midjourney plays in another league in the level of realism that it can apply to photographs.
Of course, they are not perfect. In case of zooming in certain areas, the deception is obvious. But of course, it is difficult to have this attitude as soon as you see a photograph, although it may be that since the launch of the different Artificial Intelligences you have to be very careful when believing that a photograph is real.
Photos of the Pope in a coat that looks like it’s from Balenciaga’s winter collection are fake
Among the different errors that can be found in these photographs, there is one that stands out above the rest as it is in a place that is too visible. Yes, we talked about how the glasses are integrated into the Pope’s face. The AI Midjourney seems to have trouble with this and causes the glass on one side to have melted into the skin of the face.
Although what is surprising this time is that the hands have been done very well in two of the photographs that have been published on Reddit. Of course, one of the hands is also an indication that it is an image generated by Artificial Intelligence. It is the photograph that shows the Pope in the street carrying what is supposed to be a bottle.
In this particular case the bottle seems to be fused with the hand and the gesture of holding it is completely artificial. Despite all these small details, the photos of the Pope are and will be a sample of the photorealism that Midjourney is capable of achieving. We will have to wait to see what the next ones are. viral images.
