About

Pope in White Puffer Jacket, also known as Balenciaga Pope and Pope Francis Drip, is an AI-generated image of Pope Francis wearing a long white puffer coat, which was created with Midjourney. The photo inspired many jokes and memes about the Pope, drip and hip-hop culture. It also looked realistic enough to many that a notable portion believed it was a genuine photo, leading to debate over the consequences and possibilities of artificial intelligence.

Origin

On March 24th, 2023, the photo of Pope Francis wearing a long puffer coat (along with three others) was posted to the /r/midjourney subreddit by a Redditor whose account was deleted shortly after. The original post received over 700 upvotes in two days.^[1] It was presumably made on Midjourney.

A later Reddit post (seen below) on March 26th, 2023 on the subreddit /r/aiArt, by a user who claimed to have generated the original image and later been banned from Reddit, shared the prompt which was purportedly used.^[8] The original generator of the prompt also shared a link to their Instagram, @art_2_inspire, which featured other images generated using AI.^[9]

On the evening of Saturday, March 25th, Twitter user @skyferrori then reposted the image on that platform (seen below). This post received over 178,000 likes, and within the next hour or so, several others commemorating the "dripped-up pontiff" were made.^[2]

Spread

Later Twitter posts spreading the photo around garnered hundreds of thousands of likes and interactions as it went viral in late March 2023. Others also started riffing off the central meme. For example, on March 25th, Twitter user @GritGrowthCap imagined an album cover with Pope Francis on it, receiving over 3,300 likes in one day (seen below, left).^[6] Also that day, user @Javalle posted a version with Abraham Lincoln wearing a similar outfit, earning almost 500 likes in a similar timeframe (seen below, right).^[7]

Commentary about the Pope Francis Drip meme led many to question whether society was prepared for the widespread use of artificial intelligence, given how real-looking the AI-generated image of Francis appeared to be. For example, on March 26th, celebrity Chrissy Teigen confessed to being duped by the image (seen below), receiving almost 14,000 likes in less than a day.^[5]

Various Examples

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External References