![]() ![]() Raising money for research: The mission comes with an inspirational "gift shop" Image: Inspiration4/John Kraus UTC) from Complex 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida.Ĭomplex 39A was the site, from where the Apollo missions launched in the late 1960s, including Apollo 11, which was the first to successfully land people on the moon. EDT (Thursday, September 16 at 00:02 a.m. The mission is scheduled for launch on Wednesday, September 15, at 8:02 p.m. The company has gone from announcement to launch in just over six months. Inspiration4 is more than that - not just because of its destination, but also because of its science objectives and the crew onboard. I’m going to take a page out of the pope’s book, and say something absolute and moral: we really need to make “being sceptical of things by default” cool again, or else we’re going to be in a whole mess of trouble.It would be a tad unfair to lump SpaceX's Inspiration4 under space tourism. ![]() For years I’ve smirked and laughed at those who have been fed misinformation online – imagine believing a lie! – and now Coat Pope has done the same to me. I now have sympathy for older people who are seemingly so easily manipulated by a shonky Photoshop edit or a comment thread that makes them go and attack a 5G tower. I suppose this is a turning point, then: the moment “generation internet” finally got conned online. ![]() Coat Pope is fun for now, but it only takes an AI-generated video of him saying, “Dogs go to heaven, cats go to hell” and very real fights could break out. There are already jokey AI-generated videos of President Biden and Justin Bieber (two equally important cultural icons), and though they are just a degree or two off convincing right now, give it two weeks. It was only last year we were all playing with the smudgy, strange art generated by Dall-E, and since that time the ability of these AI-powered tools seems to have leapt forwards. But I still put it on Instagram and said it was “cool” anyway. 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. I checked the hands (like all young artists, AI struggles with hands). Here’s the thing: I actually wondered, “Is this image AI?” when I first saw it. So it has shocked me quite fundamentally to be pranked by an AI version of the pope. ![]() 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 – and I thought I knew my way around. 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. Lord, forgive me.Īs 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. 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. Right? He’s always doing tweets and saying something very slightly liberal. 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. His holiness can be out there doing his things, and I can be over here doing mine, and our ecosystems never really cross. Here’s my first excuse: I don’t really know much about popes. I t happened to me: I thought the image of the pope in a big coat was real. ![]()
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