An image made with Midjourney by Pablo Xavier, a construction worker from the Chicago area, was posted to the r/midjourney subreddit: Pope Francis in a white puffer jacket. It spread across Twitter and Reddit over the weekend, and a great many people took it for a photograph without realising it had been generated. Days earlier, Eliot Higgins, founder of the investigative outlet Bellingcat, had posted around fifty images of Donald Trump being arrested. He said plainly in the thread that they were AI-generated, and they carried visible errors — in one, Trump has three legs — but they travelled widely before anyone pointed that out. Midjourney suspended Higgins's account and blocked the word "arrested" in prompts. Behind both was version 5, released on 15 March, whose realism had reached the point of imitating a press photograph. At the time it read as a shift in what image generation was taken to be: from a tool for making pictures to one for making things indistinguishable from the real thing.