Deepfake Pope Francis wears deepfake LGBTQ+ flag
Photographs of Pope Francis cloaked in the pride flag used to show support for LGBTQ+ people has been found to have been generated by artificial intelligence. The photos, which circulated on Twitter and Facebook, came amidst a spike in anti-LGBTQ disinformation on social media coinciding with the celebration of pride month in June 2023. The images appear to designed to build support for the LGBTQ+ movement. The first versions of the images discovered by AFP emanated from a Twitter account named 'Gay Forest' and had been shared on Facebook under the same name in April 2023. In February 2023, photographs of Pope Francis wearing the Latin American Youth Ministry cross were found to have been misrepresented online, with some users incorrectly linking the colours to the pride flag. Deepfake Deepfakes (a portmanteau of ' deep learning ' and 'fake') are images, videos, or audio which are edited or generated using artificial intelligence tools, and which may depict real or non-existent people. They are a type of synthetic media. Source: Wikipedia 🔗 System 🤖 Unknown Operator: XCorp/Twitter; Meta/Facebook Developer: Country: Argentina; Italy Sector: Religion Purpose: Build support Technology: Text-to-image; Neural network; Deep learning; Machine learning Issue: Ethics/values; Mis/disinformation; Trans parency F act check 🚩 AFP (2023). Images of Pope Francis wearing pride flag are AI-generated GRASS Fact Check (2023). Disinformation: The Pope wore a LGBTQ+ cross
- Date it happened
- 2023-04-01
- Organisation involved
- xAI; Facebook
- Product, system or model
- Midjourney
This incident was imported from AIAAIC and is used under CC BY-SA 4.0. Our additions to it — the structured fields, the translation, the checks against other reports — are published under the same licence.
This is a record of what was reported, not a finding that anyone broke the law. If it names your organisation and you believe it is wrong, the corrections process is free and open to everyone.