Viral Image of Pope Francis in a Puffer Jacket Revealed to Be AI-Generated

March 24, 2023

The viral image of Pope Francis donning a white puffer jacket was revealed to be an AI-generated deepfake produced by the photorealistic-image-generator Midjourney. This incident underscores the need for trustworthy AI governance and the implementation of safe and secure AI practices.

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Matched TAIM controls

Suggested mapping from embedding similarity (not a formal assessment). Browse all TAIM controls

MEASURE 2.6 — similarity 0.644, rank 1. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MAP 1.6 — similarity 0.640, rank 2. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MAP 4.2 — similarity 0.638, rank 3. TAIM detail and related incidents →

Alleged deployer: eliot-higgins
Alleged developer: midjourney
Alleged harmed parties: pope-francis

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/510

Data source

Incident data is from the AI Incident Database (AIID).

When citing the database as a whole, please use:

McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-21). Virtual Conference.

Pre-print on arXiv · Database snapshots & citation guide

We use weekly snapshots of the AIID for stable reference. For the official suggested citation of a specific incident, use the “Cite this incident” link on each incident page.