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by PradeetPatel 70 days ago
What an incredibly diverse and inclusive UI design. I often find that Indian mythologies tend to be overshadowed, but with the advent of AI generated art and media there's been a resurgence of Indian-centric stories.

Keep up the good work!
1 comments
naravara 70 days ago
The internet being flooded with AI slop masquerading as devotional artwork has been among the most depressing things about GenAI. It has no meaning or intention or devotion behind it, it’s just engagement farming. Nothing of value is added by having Devi with extra fingers on each hand and completely blurred messes for all the affects in her hands. Or pictures of Rama shooting a bansuri out of his bow. It’s just tripe. We could have told the stories with an overlay of open source artwork from Raja Ravi Varma or Gita Press or old Tanjore paintings or Chola bronzes or whatever if we couldn’t afford to hire an artist who knows what items Vishnu is supposed to be holding in each hand.

It’s not a problem just for us Hindus either. I see so much terrible Jesus/angel “artwork” everywhere. It makes me start to wonder if maybe the Wahabbis were onto something with their complete taboo around depictions of God or the prophets.

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amritananda 70 days ago
>Nothing of value is added by having Devi with extra fingers on each hand and completely blurred messes for all the affects in her hands

South Asian religions are in an especially bad position because so many works related to them have never been digitized (and quite frankly, in some cases what's available on the internet is of extremely low quality) [1]. I'd be pretty concerned if someone were to rely on entirely on these models since the probability of hallucinations (or at the very least, erasure of regional/ideological diversity) probably skyrockets because the information was never actually there in the training data to begin with.

[1] I was able to find a few works of Newari Buddhist iconography recently, so it might be changing: https://web.archive.org/web/20240901130203/https://download..... It still has a few mistakes and doesn't compare to what's out there, though.

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SilverElfin 70 days ago
If they’re never digitized then where do you get the originals?
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naravara 69 days ago
Some references have been digitized but “Hinduism” is a broad collection of religious traditions with many different stories and folk practices and depictions of various deities and tales. Many of the depictions are considered “valid” only in the specific context of a particular temple or for a specific community and it becomes completely nonsensical once you start randomly jumbling up elements of all the Gods from across all of India over all of time.
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