Icons as a Service: How AI Image Generation Revives Ancient Iconoclasm
Drawing parallels between the biblical Ark of the Covenant, Byzantine iconoclasm, and Plato's critique of imitation, this essay argues that AI image generators are the ultimate expression of humanity's 'forge of idols.' It traces how images, once created, take on a life of their own, distorting the truths they represent. With AI, Calvin's metaphorical mind-forge is now externalized and mechanized, producing images indistinguishable from reality, raising urgent questions about representation, truth, and the nature of creativity.
A thought, formed nowhere (either embodied in a human or disembodied by an agent), immediately projected into an image; the image immediately loose in the world, already indistinguishable from what it was trying to resemble.
- chicken-stew
Off-topic:
before clicking the link, for a split second I thought the article was going to be about an image host where you get the resource not by URI but a description of the image. Imagine a world of webs where the “html” consists not of formal markup but of prose that describe the structure, css and javascript. The images don’t have a src, the alt would probably suffice.
- mitxela
Oh so that's why images are prohibited. It's not because they steal souls, it's because people get used to the image instead of the real thing. People program to the abstraction, and forget the underlying machine.
I've wondered if watching cartoons as a kid contributed to my face blindness. Probably not, but you can see how there's plausible, if you spend too much time as a child looking at faces without detail and designed to be easily recognizable instead of real faces, you might not develop the neural circuitry to recognize real faces.
- wvbdmp
Isn’t jewish iconoclasm also related to god having made humans “in his image”? As the article notes, in Egypt icons/images were used as the gods’ representation on earth, and by extension that of the kings. They literally projected their power, so damaging them is obviously an affront.
In Genesis they took this concept but applied it to all humans, ruling the earth in god’s stead. We’re the icons, so any other icons pervert this revolutionary idea and risk devolving back into some kind of paganism.