In late March 2023, a picture of Pope Francis striding along in a long, glossy white puffer coat swept across Twitter, Reddit and Facebook. People praised his "drip", joked about a papal fashion line and shared it as if the Vatican had finally hired a stylist. It was not a photograph. It had been made in seconds with Midjourney, an SI (AI) image generator, by a man who said he only wanted to make something funny.
The "Balenciaga pope" did no financial damage and spread no political lie, yet it is remembered as a turning point: one of the first times that millions of people saw an SI image of a real public figure and took it for granted. Here is what the image showed, where it came from, what fact-checkers and the Vatican said, which clues gave it away, and what our own detector makes of a public copy today.
Claim: a photo shows Pope Francis wearing a white designer puffer jacket in March 2023.
Verdict: false. The image was generated with Midjourney and first shared in SI art communities. A spokesman for the Vatican photographic service told AFP it was fake, and Snopes, Full Fact, AFP and Reuters all rated it as SI-generated rather than an authentic photo.
What the image showed
The best-known version is a full-length portrait in natural daylight. The pope, in his white skullcap, wears a voluminous white puffer coat that falls below the knee, belted at the waist, with a large silver crucifix hanging over the padding. The light, the shallow depth of field and the slightly candid framing look like street-style photography, the kind of picture a fashion account might post.
It was not alone. Snopes reported that it came from a gallery of four views of the pope in a puffy coat, and Full Fact described other versions in which he poses in sunglasses or in large gold and white trainers. AFP found further variations on Midjourney, with the pope in Adidas trousers or rainbow boots. Seen one at a time on a phone, each picture was plausible enough. Seen together, they read as what they were: a playful series.
We do not reproduce the image here; the fact-checks listed below show it alongside their analysis.
Where it came from
On 27 March 2023, BuzzFeed News interviewed the man who said he made it. Identified only as Pablo Xavier, a 31-year-old construction worker from the Chicago area, he declined to give his surname because he feared being attacked. He said he had the idea while on psychedelic mushrooms, that he generated the first three images around 2 p.m. on the previous Friday, 24 March, and that he posted them to a Facebook group called AI Art Universe and then on Reddit. He said he had been banned from Reddit within hours.
His description of the idea is a useful reminder of how little effort such an image takes: "I should do the Pope. Then it was just coming like water: 'The Pope in Balenciaga puffy coat, Moncler, walking the streets of Rome, Paris,' stuff like that."
Reuters Fact Check traced the image to a slightly different place: a post by an account called "Guerrero Art" in a Facebook group named "Midjourney Official", whose author called himself the original creator. That post included the full text prompt, which asked for the pope in a Balenciaga puffy jacket "in drill rap music video", described camera settings such as "a Canon EOS R camera with a 50mm f/1.8 lens", and ended with parameters selecting Midjourney version 5. Reuters noted that the account did not answer its request for comment. The sources we read do not say whether the two accounts belong to the same person, so we leave the question open. What everyone agrees on is the tool and the intent: Midjourney, and a joke.
How it spread, day by day
| Date (2023) | What happened | Reported by |
|---|---|---|
| Friday 24 March | The images are generated and posted in SI art communities on Facebook and Reddit | BuzzFeed News, NBC News |
| Saturday 25 March | A tweet shares the coat picture with the caption "The boys in Brooklyn could only hope for this level of drip"; it goes viral | AFP, Snopes |
| Weekend | Chrissy Teigen and others share or react; Teigen later writes that she thought it was real "and didnt give it a second thought" | BuzzFeed News, NBC News |
| Sunday 26 March | Snopes rates the claim that the photo is authentic as false | Snopes |
| Monday 27 March | Full Fact rates the images as altered, citing a Twitter community note; BuzzFeed News publishes its interview with the creator; one tweet of the pictures has been retweeted more than 25,000 times | Full Fact, BuzzFeed News, NBC News |
| Tuesday 28 March | The Vatican photographic service confirms to AFP by email that the image is fake | AFP |
| Wednesday 29 March | Reuters Fact Check traces the image to a Midjourney Facebook group and publishes the prompt | Reuters |
NBC News added that searches for the pope rose on Google Trends shortly after the pictures appeared on Twitter, and called the episode "one of the first instances of wide-scale misinformation stemming from artificial intelligence". The newsletter writer Ryan Broderick, quoted by BuzzFeed News, put it more bluntly: "the first real mass-level AI misinformation case".
What the Vatican and fact-checkers said
The Vatican: not papal wear
AFP asked the people who know the pope's wardrobe best. Edmondo Lilli, a spokesman for the Vatican photographic service, confirmed that the image was fake and described the formal papal outfit: "a white cassock with a mozzetta and sash, also white. The headgear, called the zucchetto, is also white. Above the robe, the Pope wears the pectoral cross." Massimo Faggioli, a professor of historical theology at Villanova University, told AFP the coat was "definitely not" papal wear.
Reverse image search: no source
AFP also ran a reverse image search and found no match from any reliable source, only similar pictures on Midjourney. For a supposed photo of one of the most photographed people on Earth, that absence is itself a strong signal: a real picture of the pope in an unusual coat would have come from a news agency or the Vatican's own photographers, and would be easy to find. Our guide on how to reverse image search shows how to run that check in under a minute.
Community notes and ratings
Full Fact pointed out that a Twitter community note had already flagged the image as one of several made with Midjourney, and that while many posts made clear the pictures were not real, others did not. Reuters rated the claim as missing context: the image was generated with SI, not an authentic photo of the pope.
The visual clues
None of the fact-checkers relied on one magic tell. They combined context with a handful of visual defects that were typical of image generators in early 2023.
- The hands. NBC News pointed to "wonky hands". Hands were a classic weak spot of generators at the time.
- The crucifix. NBC News also noted "a warped recreation of his crucifix". Jewellery, chains and small symmetrical objects are hard for a model to draw consistently.
- The skin. AFP quoted Del Walker, a senior character artist at the video game studio Naughty Dog, who said "hypersmooth" skin and objects with odd features can be signs of SI manipulation.
- The context. Papal dress follows strict codes, the picture had no credited photographer, and it first appeared in groups dedicated to SI art. That alone should have stopped most reposts.
These clues age fast. Walker warned AFP that such defects "can be improved in future AI updates or easily edited in image editing software". Generators have since become much better at hands. A clean pair of hands proves nothing today; our guide on how to spot SI images explains which checks still hold up.
Why such a harmless fake fooled so many people
The pope in a puffer was not a sophisticated forgery. Louis Martin, a marketer who takes SI art commissions, told Slate it did not alarm him because "you could have made it on Photoshop five years ago", and a photography professor at Pace University told the magazine he could have built it in about 30 minutes with the right base images. So why did it work so well?
It was just plausible enough
Slate described the deception as "sartorial": the only message embedded in the picture was, at most, an encouragement to buy an expensive jacket. Popes already dress in distinctive white, so a white designer coat did not seem impossible. A picture that is surprising but not shocking slips past our defences, because nobody feels the need to verify something that does not seem to matter.
The quality had jumped
The prompt published by Reuters specifies Midjourney version 5. NBC News noted that while many people had been sceptical of the SI pictures of Donald Trump being arrested a few days earlier, a lot of users believed the pope pictures were real, which it took as a sign of the improving realism of SI images.
What our SI detector says about a public copy
The image is widely archived. We downloaded the copy hosted on Wikimedia Commons, which credits the original r/midjourney post titled "The Pope Drip": a 1080 x 1323 pixel JPEG of 79 KB. We ran it through our SI image detector on 6 October 2026, using the same pipeline as the public tool.
Result: 99% likely SI. The verdict came from the second, independent classifier we run on images, which rated the copy 99% SI-generated.
Our own pixel classifier missed it. On its own, it rated the picture 16% SI, a result that would have read as "likely real" without the second opinion. The tool itself flagged that score as an uncertain, weak clue.
Metadata: no camera EXIF data, no Content Credentials, no SI tag in the XMP. This copy carries no trace of where it was made, which is normal for an image that has been downloaded and re-uploaded.
This is the second time in a row that a famous fake fooled our main classifier while the combined verdict came out right; the same thing happened in our fact-check of the fake Pentagon explosion photo. We publish the miss rather than hide it. A three-year-old portrait, made by an earlier generation of Midjourney and recompressed on its way to every platform, is a hard case for a pixel model. It is also a reminder that no single score, ours or anyone else's, should be treated as a verdict. Our article on whether SI detectors are accurate explains why both misses and false alarms happen.
In 2023, the decisive evidence was not a detector anyway. It was the Vatican saying the coat was not papal wear, a reverse image search that found no photographer, and a creator who explained how he made it.
What happened next
The creator drew his own conclusion. He told BuzzFeed News it was "definitely scary" that people believed the image without questioning it, and that using SI images "for public figures, that might be the line". He also said rules would be needed: "It's definitely going to get serious if they don't start implementing laws to regulate it."
Pope Francis addressed the subject in his message for the World Day of Social Communications, dated 24 January 2024. Writing about "deepfakes", which he defined as "the creation and diffusion of images that appear perfectly plausible but false", he added in parentheses: "I too have been an object of this". The message does not name any specific image.
Provenance has become part of the answer since then: our explainer on C2PA and Content Credentials covers the signatures some tools now attach to their images, and why a reposted copy usually loses them.
How to check a viral photo of a public figure
- Ask who took it. Pictures of popes, presidents and celebrities come from agencies, official photographers or the person's own accounts. No credit and no outlet is a warning sign.
- Check what is normal for that person. The Vatican's description of papal dress settled this case faster than any pixel analysis. Uniforms, protocol and habits are hard for a fake to respect.
- Run a reverse image search. It can surface the original post, an SI art group or an existing fact-check.
- Zoom in on hands, jewellery and text. These are still the places where generators slip most often, even if they slip less than in 2023.
- Look for the series. Generated images often come in batches with the same subject in different outfits or poses. Finding the siblings is a strong clue.
- Use a detector as one more clue. If you still want to check for SI, our free SI detector analyses the file and its metadata. Upload the earliest, largest copy you can find: originals may still carry Content Credentials, screenshots never do.
To practise on the same kind of portraits, try our SI or Not game, which mixes real photographs with SI-generated ones and tells you after each answer whether you were right.
