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 it'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.

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.

The ark of the covenant was itself a cultural fusion of Egyptian New Kingdom solar barques, used to carry idols, with the practices of the aniconic Midianite Yahwists of the Sinai region. The proto-Levites brought this fusion with them into Canaan, where it melded further with the endogenous Canaanite worship of El.

It's a cool bit of history, but connecting it to diffusion models feels like a bit of a stretch!

I read it more like a complex joke, or rather, a stab at the problem of why generative material of that caliber feels so fundamentally wrong to some of us.

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.