His Holiness in a tracksuit
"Imagine the Pope in a tracksuit, tracksuit!" Mamá Ladilla sang it in 2005, but we had to wait until 2023 for it to become a reality. And, suddenly, the image that went around the world: Pope Francis dressed in a posh Balenciaga coat . You had it on WhatsApp, in Instagram stories , on the front pages of newspapers, and on Twitter, going around and around. The image will go down in history as the first one created by a generative artificial intelligence that went viral and that we all believed. Back then, Midjourney, one of the most widely used AI tools today, sounded very far away, and the kid who created it said he was up to his neck in magic mushrooms. After an initial debate about the risks of AI, we all thought it was a funny story, one that opened up even funnier possibilities. It was an image made for the contemporary world: a good-natured pope, a fashionable pope, a tacky pope (because we already know how much we like a down-to-earth king and a good tacky pope).
I don't know anything else, but Bergoglio seems to have been sent to show us the inscrutable ways of Artificial Intelligence , because he will also go down in history as the first pope to be resurrected. At least virtually. The kitschy video they made of the pope's death, depicting Jesus Christ traveling through the heavens, taking selfies, visiting Mary Magdalene, and turning water into wine, far from being a stroke of genius, brings to the table the (ultra-necessary) debate about the repose of the dead and contemporary mourning, which Raquel Fernández lucidly explores in her recent essay "Digital Immortality: Colonizing Planet Death." Until recently, says Raquel Fernández, no one thought it would be necessary to legislate on the right to disappear, but it's possible that we will have to do so in the future. She also says that a dead person should only teach us how to die.
Let's go back to the beginning, because the kid who created the viral image of Pope Francis in the Balenciaga coat claimed he started using AI after a very difficult time grieving for his brother. He started by generating images of his dead brother and ended up putting a coat on the Pope. It's not a funny story anymore, is it?
Contemporary emptiness and sadness have found in AI a tool for support, which can be transformed into the complete opposite. We can already resurrect the dead; the question now is whether we will also know how to let them die.
elmundo
