The Pope with the trapper duvet, fruit of artificial (?) intelligence

So beautiful it looks True. So cool to be – of course – fake. Yet, more than someone fell for it: the image of Pope francesco wrapped up in a voluminous white duvet, in the last few hours, has been making the rounds of social media and has persuaded many – perhaps the most naive? – in a sudden and unpredictable fashion turning point of the Pontiff. Francis dressed as trapper – just missing a chain around his neck with a dollar sign instead of a crucifix and gold teeth – it’s not among the most likely visions imaginable, yet the photo was commented and shared by millions of people, going viral in a handful of hours.

But it was not, precisely, a stylistic upgrade by His Holiness, but the product generated by Midjourney, a platform that allows you to create a completely credible image, starting from a textual request. Thanks to Artificial Intelligence.

A particularly sophisticated photomontage, so to speak, just like the ones that recently saw the former president of the United States as protagonists Donald Trump fighting with the cops to escape a hypothetical arrest in New York, in a report by Eliot Higgins that raised a fuss.

The Balenciaga Popeas it was immediately renamed – even if the initial image is actually a shot taken on the occasion of the Moncler event, last September, in Piazza Duomo in Milan – was originally born on Reddit, where it was published a few days acts as a user, a certain trippy_art_special, to then lead his autonomous and uncontrolled life on various social networks, collecting millions of views.

The phenomenon of deepfake, still only in its infancy and yet already so incredibly precise, it already knows how to demonstrate all its incredible possibilities in a nutshell. But also i fearful limits of its distorted use. That it is artificial, there is no doubt. But does calling it “intelligence” really make sense, if there are those who cannot find a better use for it than the genesis of a hybrid between Francesco I and Puff Daddy? And we don’t say this to indulge the old proverb according to which one can “joke with the knaves” but must “leave the saints alone”. But because the risk of disinformation, distortion and manipulation of the news – and therefore of the truth – is already very high. As long as it’s a duvet that makes you smile, we can stay with it. But the practice does not have our… blessing: that the boundary between authentic, true, probable and false remains clear.