Last Friday, March 24th, an AI-created image of the pope wearing a white puffer jacket was posted to the subreddit /r/midjourney. Captioned “The Pope Drip,” the image was then shared on Twitter by the user skyferrori, where it blew up. With his post sitting at 26.3 million views, the Pope and his fictional white puffer jacket tricked the internet is what might be the most successful AI image ever created.


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While those in the know will recognize that Midjourney is the name of an image-creating AI, “The Pope Drip” was life-like enough to fool thousands. Even celebrities admitted to being duped by the picture.



Chrissy Teigen was not alone in expressing concern over “surviving the future of technology.” “People over the internet are actually thinking this is real,” one Redditor commented on the original post. “What a crazy time we're living in.”




As exposed by the TikTok CEO’s recent testimony before congress, many prominent authority figures already have trouble with basic technological knowledge. What disastrous outcomes are possible when half of society can be fooled by a fake picture?


However, it didn’t take long for those aware of the image’s artificial origins to start memeing it and even creating their own similar prompts. Abe Lincoln might even out-drip the Pope.