The Pope in a Kijang
Could've he been wearing a Balenciaga puffer jacket?
This piece was written in collaboration* with GPT-4o-kun
*in reality, it did all the writing
There’s an image of the Pope riding shotgun in a Kijang Innova in Jakarta. It feels surreal, even though, in theory, entirely possible. A man, dressed in white robes, casually seated beside the driver of a Toyota minivan. It’s a snapshot from a reality that, until it happened, never crossed our minds. The Pope doesn’t ride in janky cars like that, right? Except now he does. And suddenly, we’re left to reconcile with the fact that the Pope can ride in a Kijang Innova—a wrinkle in our expectations.
But then there’s the image of the Pope in a Balenciaga puffer jacket, and for some reason, that one feels more real. More expected. Or, perhaps, less jarring. This particular absurdity exists in a space of high-fashion fantasy and internet culture, where the Pope wrapped in streetwear doesn’t even require the suspension of disbelief. No one’s shocked that an AI generated the image. Some part of us even welcomes it, like we’ve been waiting for this fashion moment to materialize. The difference is context—it’s as if the internet had already half-imagined this into being, and AI simply took care of the details.
We live in the age of found moments, but not in the way photography once immortalized them. A camera captures reality—a fleeting instant where light, motion, and time converge into meaning. The beauty of a photograph was its precision: it freezes the unfreezable, saves the otherwise forgotten. The camera fixes meaning.
AI image generation, though, doesn’t fix meaning—it creates it. It generates moments we never lived but can believe in. AI scours the latent space of possibility, pulling from some alternate timeline where the Pope might’ve been in that Innova, or where, improbably, he’s strolling through the Vatican wrapped in a couture jacket. AI doesn’t just freeze time—it imagines time. It pulls forth these could-have-been moments, not bound by the actual but by the possible. And what we end up with is something more than an image: it’s a snapshot of an alternate world, a fabricated yet believable reality.
But here’s where the tension lies—the Pope in the Innova feels weird not because it defies physics or logic, but because it defies context. Yet the Pope in a Balenciaga jacket feels natural in its absurdity. Why? Because we’re trained to accept certain types of unreality, especially those rooted in cultural mashups or meme culture. What we resist is the subtle surrealism of seeing something possible but unlikely. The Pope in an Innova is too close to real, and that’s where the dissonance kicks in.
The interplay between possibility and control defines our relationship with AI art—and it echoes the same dynamic we see with NFTs. With NFT art, the artist builds an entire pipeline of control, crafting a generative system where randomness is constrained by predefined rules. They set the inputs, control the outputs, and create scarcity by design. The artist doesn’t just guide the system—they build it. Maximal control.
AI art flips that equation. Randomness is a feature, not a bug. The artist gives up control to the black box, coaxing meaning from the system but never fully owning the process. Prompts are input, but what emerges is the result of an unpredictable dance between intent and algorithmic serendipity. It’s curation more than creation, a process of finding images rather than making them.
And in between these two poles—NFT’s rigid control and AI’s chaotic unpredictability—there’s something worth considering. The way AI art emerges feels less like a conscious act of creation and more like discovering something that was always hidden beneath the surface, waiting to be revealed. It’s not that the artist builds a process or fully directs the outcome, but rather that the algorithm traverses a vast landscape of possibilities, finding fragments of meaning as it meanders through latent space. what we witness in these moments—especially in AI video—are glimpses of this unpredictable journey.
Take, for example, the peculiar distortions we see in AI-generated videos. As the algorithm attempts to interpolate between two images, it produces frames that seem to defy logic—objects stretch, meanings shift, reality itself bends. The AI isn’t simply filling in the gaps; it’s struggling with the ambiguity of what could happen between point A and point B. Sometimes, these in-between moments make sense, but more often than not, they feel like glimpses into an alternate reality—one that mirrors our own but operates under a different set of rules.
These strange artifacts tell us something about the nature of AI art. It’s not just about randomness or unpredictability, nor is it simply about control. It’s a process of negotiation between what the artist intends and what the algorithm is capable of producing. AI art is born from this friction, this delicate tension between human input and machine output. The AI doesn’t create in the same way a human does; it doesn’t have intent or vision. But it does traverse a space of infinite possibilities, and occasionally, it lands on something that resonates.
In the end, the artist is no longer just a creator—they’re a navigator of possibility, setting conditions for meaning to emerge, whether through strict NFT pipelines or chaotic diffusion. It's a new form of authorship, a kind of controlled randomness where the real and the unreal collide, and we’re left to wonder which is more believable—the Pope in a Kijang Innova or the Pope wrapped in couture.
