A PICTURE OF figures in religious vestments standing before a goat-like deity has been shared dozens of times online, along with false claims that it shows devil worship in the Vatican.

Versions of the picture appear to show priests in a cathedral-type setting in front of a representation of Baphomet, a half-man half-goat icon associated with Satanism. 

However, higher-definition versions of the picture found online reveal many telltale signs that the image was generated by Artificial Intelligence.

“Vatican worshipping Satan, but they tell us that worshipping Satan is evil,” reads a post that includes the AI-generated image, shared on 3 November by an Irish Facebook user and shared hundreds of times.

The Vatican is a tiny city state headed by the Pope and functions as the administrative centre and seat of leadership of the Catholic Church.

Tools provided by Meta show that the same picture and claim about Satanic rites have been posted at least a dozen times on Facebook and Instagram, accumulating more than 50,000 views.

However, the image does not provide any evidence of devil worship. This is because it’s not a real photo at all.

Google and Yandex reverse image search tools reveal there have been scores more uses of the image, almost always alongside claims of devil worship in the Vatican.

However, some versions of the image are quite high-definition, allowing viewers to see details that are unclear in smaller versions, which are not details that would appear in a real photo.

The supposed picture includes an asymmetrical altar, clothes with random patterns, and stoles (bands of fabric worn by priests over their shoulders during mass) that are held on by irregular lumps of painted wood.

A higher definition version of the image

The claim that the picture shows a bizarre ritual might explain some of these odd details.

AI-image generators are trained using huge amounts of other photos, which they try to emulate patterns from in order to produce a legitimate-looking image.

Although the results are frequently impressive, they can also demonstrate a misunderstanding by the AI model of how light, space, and subjects depicted actually look in the real world.

These mistakes provide fact-checkers with telltale signs that an image is generated by an AI.

Most famously, AI image generators have a hard time depicting hands correctly, and often show bizarre anatomy or incorrect numbers of fingers.

This helps explain why none of the people shown in the Vatican image have faces. The greater definition picture shows that the people at the altar, as well as dozens in the darkness behind it, have faces without features.

There are also geometrical oddities, like a priest whose legs are hidden behind a mass of marble while his hand is on the altar in front of it.

The main celebrant of the black mass appears to be merging into the altar.

The index and middle fingers of the Baphomet statue are cut off by a vertical line — it is unclear what this line was supposed to depict.

There is also a floating, ghostly piece of cloth to the left-hand side of the image.

The images feed into claims that the Catholic Church is secretly a stronghold of Satanism, which have been spread since the Reformation in the 1500s.

It is still a belief held by some Christian sects: DUP leader Ian Paisley was famously ejected from the European Parliament in 1988 when he accused the Pope, who was speaking there, of being the Antichrist.

While fabricated images have long been used to spread misinformation, there has been a notable uptick in the use of completely AI-generate imagery to bolster untrue claims since late last year.

The Journal has previously debunked AI-generated images of police stand-offs; burning buildings; a prophetic Simpsons episode; French demonstrations; videos appearing to show Simon Harris congratulate anti-immigrant groups and Michael O’Leary promoting a cryptocurrency scam; as well as numerous fake images spread during the US presidential race.

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