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.