The Pope in a Coat Is Not From a Holy Place
Reading Time: 5 minutesA look inside Midjourney, the mind-breaking A.I. tool where users create the sacred (Francis in a puffer) and the profane (you don’t want to know)., The Pope in a coat A.I. image came from Midjourney. What else is coming from it?
Over the weekend, an A.I.-generated photo of the pope in a white Balenciaga puffer jacket went viral, fooling thousands of people and ultimately convincing its creator—a construction worker tripping on mushrooms—that artificial intelligence should be regulated.
My first thought, upon seeing it explode on Twitter, was: how sweet. A.I. aside, I understand why some people will be offended by any digital deception involving the head of the Roman Catholic Church. The 86-year-old bishop himself has urged youth to be wary of A.I. image tools’ predecessor, Photoshop. Jesus doesn’t want disciples who rely on digital image manipulation, he told a crowd of young people in 2018. Perhaps he meant it metaphorically, but still.
As far as invented photos go, this one is pretty innocent. The deception is sartorial. The only propaganda embedded in it is an encouragement to buy a $3,000 jacket. It makes sense that this artwork is becoming the Theodore Roosevelt on a moose of A.I. Like that image of the 26th president, which was created in 1912 using composite photo techniques, it relies on just the right amount of the outrageous and the benign to trick people into credulously sharing it. But for those who are now fixated on the pope and the future, it’s worth considering that there are already more disturbing images floating around Midjourney, the particular A.I. tool used to create the pontiff of puff.
At the top of this list are ‘photos’ that purport to show that the 1969 moon landing was fake:
Louis Martin, a professional marketer who takes A.I. art commissions on the freelance marketplace Fiverr in his free time, tipped me off to the moon landing images. He is excited about A.I., but something about one Reddit user’s comment—’Can’t wait to see this on my uncle’s Facebook in 6 months’—left him feeling kind of nauseous.
‘The pope thing didn’t really alarm me, you could have made it on Photoshop 5 years ago,’ Martin said. (Eugenio Solis De Ovando, a photography professor at Pace University, confirmed this, suggesting that if he had the right base images, he could have created the puffer pope in 30 minutes.) But it was the moon image that made ‘the last days of being able to distinguish reality from A.I’ feel different to Martin.
More than 13.7 million people have signed up for Midjourney, which became available to the public last July. Within a month, the small team was turning a profit, according to its founder David Holz, who previously created a hand-tracking software and contracted for NASA. The tool works a little differently than two other powerful word-to-image generators, DALL-E and Stable Diffusion, which have emerged over the past few years. You can see A.I.-generated images on Midjourney.com. But you cannot make them there. In order to do that you join a Discord server and prompt a bot. In September, Midjourney became the largest server on Discord. Though the tool may still sound kind of obscure, as I wrote this sentence at 9:30 p.m. on Tuesday night, nearly 1.2 million of those 13.7 million Midjourney Discord subscribers were active.
This unique setup is connected to why Midjourney is uniquely poised to facilitate creativity and disinformation. Many other A.I. tools allow you to write your prompts, download your images, and then decide what you, personally, want to share with the world. Not Midjourney, which is free so long as you’re willing to be a bit of an artistic exhibitionist, entering your prompt in one of many public Midjourney Discord channels. Even if you pay $30 a month, allowing you to create a bit more discreetly, unless you pay $60 a month your images will still end up in a big, searchable pool on Midjourney.com.
In any one of the many Midjourney Discord groups, it’s not uncommon for a dozen different people to post prompts every minute. Enter ‘coffee that looks like a salad,’ and in the 50 seconds that it takes for the tool to turn that into an image 10 more prompts will appear. That means that in order to see what you created you have to scroll and scroll past logos, lakes, witches riding surfboards, and a request to put an empty room inside of another room in the style of a particular architect. Advanced prompters often include extremely detailed information about the style of photograph or illustration they are after, including artistic reference points and technical specifications. After the tool gives them four images, they’ll often select one and then refine it further.
For some this is so overwhelming that they immediately spend $10 a month to avoid the stream. Vivinne Williams, an artist and former Museum of Modern Art employee, who despised Midjourney for taking work from artists until she became addicted to it, falls into that category.
‘It was too intense,’ said Williams, who also takes A.I. commissions on Fiverr. But sometimes she’ll peek back in just to be reminded that ‘people are building 100-foot-tall worlds in Shanghai in the year 4000.’
In the 30 minutes I spent writing the last few paragraphs and refilling my coffee cup, here are a few of the hundreds of prompts that people posted:
The first time I entered one of these groups, I felt like I had the voyeuristic ability to see into strangers’ minds. I was immediately blown away by how imaginative human beings are. But then I was confronted with more disturbing material, namely, President Obama turned into a monkey and many pregnant celebrities. Dozens of prompters are fixated on this old racist trope and this tabloidy cultural fetish.
Yes, I realize that pregnant bodies are beautiful. And searching through the Midjourney database some pregnancies —like the Status of Liberty’s—seem motivated by curiosity. Some are also fairly inspired, for example:
But other images and prompts are less family-friendly. One person requested, ‘Kim Kardashian, pregnant, with fit thick hourglass body, with round huge chest in body paint’ in August. Another prompter inexplicably succeeded in getting a totally naked, pregnant Kardashian by requesting ‘Kim Kardashian big circle in stomach.’ I doubt Taylor Swift, who does not have children, would appreciate being turned into a pregnant cheerleader. And then there’s the pregnant young girl—as in a child—that I scrolled past.
Midjourney is known for aggressively warding against NSFW and other abusive content with strict content filters. Breasts. Boobs. Even the word chest cannot no longer be used in a prompt, much to many users’ frustration. Some of those people want to create porn. Some want to fill treasure chests with golden chihuahuas. Midjourney does not make any sort of comprehensive guide to what’s off-limits easily findable. But anecdotally, many sexual and violent phrases are off-limits. And it seems to work; the vast majority of images are quite innocent. That said, you do not have to scroll through the feed for long to see that there are ways around it. As I was counting the number of images that appear per second, a prompt for a drunk Chinese teen in a short skirt and see-through shirt got through the filters.
But as many analysts observed this week, there is no going back.
‘This is the Google and Facebook of our time,’ said Crystal Graffio, who enjoys making A.I. images as a hobby and side hustle, while hoping the tool does not fall into the wrong hands. We’re way past that point. Let’s just hope that your cousin on Facebook will remember to consider that the image that supports his paranoid theory may have been created by an A.I. explorer tripping on mushrooms.
Ref: slate
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