AI-generated images have gone viral before, but none have spread so far and wide as a picture of the pope wearing what can only be described as a swagged-out puffy jacket<\/a>. Call him the Supreme pontiff. The Balenciaga bishop. The vicar of drip.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The picture seems to have been first posted online on Friday, submitted to a subreddit for the AI image generator Midjourney. Over the weekend, it spread on Twitter and other social networks, first as a meme and then as the subject of debunking. By Sunday, Chrissy Teigen was tweeting<\/a> about it \u2014\u00a0a reliable indicator that an internet joke has gone mainstream.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cI thought the pope\u2019s puffer jacket was real and didnt give it a second thought. no way am I surviving the future of technology,\u201d Teigen tweeted, encapsulating the responses of many internet users. In her replies, someone said they thought calling it AI-generated was<\/em> the joke, and Teigen responded: \u201cOh man now I\u2019m REAL confused. Is it real?? i hate myself lol.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The image is definitely fake, and there are important tells<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The image is definitely fake. Not only was it posted to the Midjourney<\/a> subreddit alongside three alternatives (Midjourney usually generates four images in response to each prompt) but it also contains telltale signs of AI generation, including a number of areas where details are conspicuously smeared. There\u2019s the not quite hand not quite grasping a not quite coffee cup; a crucifix without proper right angles that depicts Jesus if he\u2019d been sculpted in clay and sat on; and the edge of a glasses lens that somehow transitions into its own shadow \u2014 all indicative of AI generation: products of a system that knows the surface of reality but not the underlying rules that govern how physical objects interact.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n And yet, to point all this out seems like pedantry because the image undeniably looks<\/em> real \u2014<\/em>for a certain definition of real, anyway. If you scrolled past it in your feed on Friday, you probably didn\u2019t give it a second thought, perhaps tweeting \u201cdang the pope a dripgod\u201d and then moving on with your day.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n But it\u2019s useful to analyze why this particular image went viral, as it reveals a lot about how AI fakes will be shared and spread in the coming months. (No more than that, though: the field is moving too fast for predictions to keep longer than frozen leftovers.) To be more specific, the image went viral because it represents a particular alignment of subject and aesthetic \u2014\u00a0it works as a fake precisely because it matches ways we already consume images today.\u00a0 <\/p>\n<\/div>\n First, there\u2019s the subject: the pope himself. As journalist Ryan Broderick noted on Twitter, there\u2019s something particular about the pope\u2019s image that lends credence to the fake. \u201cMy theory as to why it\u2019s fooling so many (myself initially included) is that the pope aesthetically exists in the same uncanny valley as most AI art,\u201d tweeted<\/a> Broderick. To be more explicit: the pope is known for wearing stylish clothes, and images of him often go viral because of this. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n As trend forecaster Ayesha Siddiqi noted<\/a>, the association between the bishop of Rome and Italian fashion is so strong that the Vatican has been forced to debunk rumors that the pope wears designer loafers. (\u201cThe pope, in summary, does not wear Prada, but Christ\u201d was the official rebuttal.) And there are so many swaggy photos of Pope Francis floating around the web that others were able to pair this recent AI fake with real examples<\/a>, like the pope signing a Lamborghini. It\u2019s this contrast between the pope\u2019s spiritual authority and material swagger that so often makes the man a meme. (That and the fact he tweets real good<\/a>.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n AI art generators are particularly attuned to a certain hyperreal aesthetic<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Just as importantly, though, the fact that the pope is a celebrity<\/em> makes unbelievable images of him inherently more believable. This is because of the style of image created by AI art generators. It\u2019s a specific look closely associated with Midjourney\u2019s software, which received\u00a0an update a few weeks ago<\/a> improving the quality of its output and which has, in turn, created a mini wave of believable AI fakes currently circulating the web. (It also helps that there are lots of pictures of celebrities in Midjourney\u2019s training data, making them easier to generate.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Let\u2019s call this style hyperrealism. First, because it\u2019s the adjective often used in text prompts to generate such pictures, and second, because it links the aesthetic to Jean Baudrillard\u2019s concept of the hyperreal \u2014\u00a0a culture in which simulations displace reality. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n Hyperrealism in the context of AI images is an aesthetic defined by perfect lighting and glossy surfaces, by dramatic poses and saturated colors. It\u2019s stylized and exaggerated \u2014 the sort of image we already associate with celebrities, whose likenesses are reproduced with such abundance and deliberation that they often already look fake. What\u2019s interesting (and links the aesthetic of AI hyperrealism to Baudrillard\u2019s philosophy) is that many in the AI art community describe these images as \u201cphotorealistic<\/a>\u201d when they are clearly cartoonish. For these people, what\u2019s real is the output of AI systems: it\u2019s the simulation displacing reality. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n I think it\u2019s these factors together that explain why certain AI images have gone viral recently. The swag pope is not the only one. You may have seen fake pictures of Elon Musk holding hands with AOC<\/a>; French President Emmanuel Macron running through clouds of tear gas<\/a>; or Donald Trump being arrested<\/a>. In each case, the celebrity of the subject primes us to believe our eyes, as does the content, which is often linked to recent events (protests in France, Trump\u2019s rumored indictment, Musk being a creep<\/a>, etc.). <\/p>\n<\/div>\n This is both scary and reassuring \u2014 reassuring because it suggests there is currently a limit to what AI fakes are believable but scary because this technology is moving too fast for any current reassurances to hold true for long. In fact, I\u2019d say there\u2019s only one guarantee when it comes to AI images: they\u2019re only going to become believable. They\u2019re certainly not limited to their current aesthetic. And sooner or later, they\u2019re going to become hyperreal as Baudrillard defined the concept: masking the distinction entirely between the imaginary and the real.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n