East 17 member has brilliant response to 'Pope's white puffer coat'

An iconic image of Pope Francis wearing a pristine white puffer coat has been doing the rounds on social media, prompting a flood of hilarious comments and memes.

The pic – which, we regret to inform readers, is fake – shows the pontiff in his familiar zucchetto skull cap, sporting a large crucifix hanging over the glistening piece of outerwear.

Many have likened the get-up to something a rapper would wear or a member of hit 1990s boyband East 17.

After author Nick Pettigrew shared the AI-generated photo alongside the pun “Priest 17”, another fan decided to grab the band’s attention by tagging one of its stars, Tony Mortimer, in the tweet.

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Mortimer, who wrote the now-disbanded group’s only number-one single ‘Stay Another Day’, responded with his own pun, commenting back: “Pray Another Day”.

The AI-generated photo saw the Pope likened to a member of 90s boyband East 17Reddit/YouTube

The picture was created on the AI image-generating app 'midjourney' and was posted on a subreddit on Friday before it went viral on Twitter.

AI images have developed exponentially in the past few months with even Donald Trump sharing realistic, digitally-created pictures of himself. This was after fake photos of the former US president being “arrested” also stunned the internet.

And whilst the growing threat of deep fakes and AI-generated images should be of concern to us all, we can’t help but enjoy the lighthearted fun of seeing the head of the Catholic Church’s “drip”.

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