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Plenty of respected figures have started to come forward to sound the alarm about the potential dangers of artificial intelligence. Now, Pope Francis has gotten in on the action while seemingly referencing a fake photo of himself wearing a puffy white coat.
Artificial intelligence isn’t exactly a new concept, but over the past year or so, it’s become an increasingly fierce topic of debate courtesy of the technological advances that have begun to usher in a future where A.I. is poised to have a major impact on a ton of different aspects of day-to-day life.
There are plenty of evangelists who’ve argued the world will benefit from that particular development, but there are also many vocal skeptics who are concerned about the lack of safeguards and the potential pitfalls of not being able to differentiate between what’s real and what’s a product of increasingly sophisticated algorithms.
According to Ars Technica, that second issue was the focus of a message Pope Francis issued while sharing some thoughts on the 58th World Day of Social Communications. The supreme pontiff used a portion of that statement to voice some concerns about the potentially nefarious use of artificial intelligence, saying:
We need but think of the long-standing problem of disinformation in the form of fake news, which today can employ ‘deepfakes,’ namely the creation and diffusion of images that appear perfectly plausible but false (I too have been an object of this).
While he didn’t explicitly reference the image in question, it seems pretty safe to assume he was alluding to a wildly viral A.I.-generated picture of himself rocking a puffy white coat that made the rounds after it was created on Midjourney last year.
There’s always a chance Pope Francis was talking about something else, but I’m going to tell myself he’s aware of that image’s existence until proven otherwise.