Founder David Holz announced on his Discord channel, "Due to a combination of extraordinary demand and trial abuse, we are temporarily disabling free trials until we have our next improvements to the system deployed."

Millions of people saw fake images of Donald Trump being arrested, a nod to his looming indictment by a Manhattan Grand Jury.

The images were created by Elliot Higgins, founder of the Bellingcat website, who has since been banned from Midjourney.

An AI image created on Midjourney v5 of Pope Francis in a white puffer jacket fooled many people into believing it was genuine.

The image's author, Pablo Xavier, posted the images to a Facebook group called AI Art Universe and then on Reddit, after which they proceeded to go viral.

"I was just blown away," he tells Buzzfeed News. "I didn't want it to blow up like that."

Holz acknowledged that his company was uncertain about how to manage the remarkable capabilities of the tool they had developed. The CEO said that, at this point, the company could either "go full Disney or go full Wild West" when it comes to the realism of the images.

Growing concerns about AI's power

There are growing concerns about AI's power, which has increased rapidly in the last few months. Elon Musk and other notable technology figures signed a public letter calling for a "pause" on "dangerous" AI experiments so that a set of shared safety protocols can be thrashed out between the key players.

On March 27, before the publication of Pope Francis in the puffer jacket, the pontiff applauded the benefits of technology and artificial intelligence when used for the common good. However, he has warned against using AI unethically or irresponsibly.

Technology is, and has been, he said, "immensely beneficial" to our human family, especially in medicine, engineering and communications.

"At the same time," Pope Francis cautioned, "I am certain that this potential will be realised only if there is a constant and consistent commitment on the part of those developing these technologies to act ethically and responsibly."

Sources

PetaPixel

BGR

Vox

Vatican News

CathNews New Zealand

Here's my first excuse: I don't really know much about popes. His holiness can be out there doing his things, and I can be over here doing mine, and our ecosystems never really cross.

I think I just idly assumed: this one is the cool pope, right?

We had the really popey pope, and then the German pope who looked a bit like he might be in Star Wars, and now we have the cool pope.

Right?

He's always doing tweets and saying something very slightly liberal.

He's cool!

So I thought wearing a really big coat and looking like a Metal Gear Solid 2 boss battle might have been part of his ongoing cool guy shtick.

Lord, forgive me.

As it turns out, the image of the pope in a big coat, which was doing the rounds on social media this weekend, was generated by AI.

The i reliably informs me that it was created using a program called Midjourney and was seemingly first shared on a Reddit page dedicated to AI art, before going viral on Twitter.

This was shocking for me, because as someone who is 35 and self-identifies as "too online", I thought I was above being hoodwinked in this way.

I have lived through every era of the internet:

• really slow Jpeg downloads,
• not clicking links in case they were a Rick Astley video,
• staring deep into the maw of goatse,
• flash games where you beat up Osama bin Laden,
• "Star Wars kid",
• apologetic crowdfunding to say sorry to "Star Wars kid",
• making friends with an American guy on a forum,
• really seriously playing Farmville,
• following Stephen Fry on Twitter,
• having an opinion about The Dress, and
• actually posting photos of my meals on Instagram with a big heavy-handed Sierra filter over the top of it.

Now we're in the bland bit of internet before the supposed advent of web 3.0 - Facebook is basically an inaccurate local newspaper, Twitter is a big fight, and everything else is just Accept Cookies?, pop-ups and the first 100 words of a Substack.

I thought I knew my way around.

So it has shocked me quite fundamentally to be pranked by an AI version of the pope.

Here's the thing: I actually wondered, "Is this image AI?" when I first saw it.

I pinched and zoomed in. I checked the hands (like all young artists, AI struggles with hands).

They looked normal and real.

He seemed to be carrying a small sack of what I assumed was "Pope Salts", and I thought that detail was too textured for what AI was doing. Continue reading

• Joel Golby is a writer for the Guardian and Vice, and the author of Brilliant, Brilliant, Brilliant Brilliant Brilliant