# From the pope’s puffer jacket to Sora: AI images and video grew up

URL: https://ai-pulse.aglaganova.com/blog/from-the-popes-puffer-jacket-to-sora-ai-images-and-video-grew-up
Published: 2026-10-09
Author: Roman Aglaganov, Full-stack developer
Category: Models
Region: Global
Tags: deepfakes

> In a few years, AI went from blurry dreamlike pictures to photorealistic images and video with sound. That is wonderful for creativity, and a headache for anyone trying to tell what is real.

![Typographic cover: Is it real? From a pope in a puffer jacket to Sora](https://ai-pulse.aglaganova.com/api/media/file/images-1.png)

In March 2023, a picture of Pope Francis in a huge white puffer jacket went viral. It looked like a fashion shoot; it was made with Midjourney. For many people it was the moment they realised AI images were no longer obviously fake.

## How we got here

Modern image generators mostly use *diffusion*: the model learns to remove noise from images step by step, and then generates new images by starting from pure noise and “denoising” towards a text description. A research advance published in late 2021, latent diffusion, made this efficient enough to run on consumer hardware; it became Stable Diffusion, released openly in August 2022. Around the same time, OpenAI’s DALL·E 2 and Midjourney brought image generation to millions of people.

## Then came video

In February 2024, OpenAI previewed Sora, which turned text prompts into strikingly realistic video clips up to a minute long, and released it publicly in December 2024. In May 2025, Google’s Veo 3 added something its predecessors lacked: synchronised sound, including dialogue. Silent AI movies had their talkie moment.

## The real problem

The same tools that let a small studio storyboard a film let anyone fake a politician’s speech or a disaster that never happened. Detection tools struggle to keep up, which is why governments and companies are pushing for labels and content credentials that record how a file was made.

**A useful habit:** before sharing a too-perfect image or clip, ask where it came from. The pope never wore the jacket. It was still a very good jacket.

## Sources

- [Rombach et al., High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models (arXiv:2112.10752)](https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.10752)