S3/E5: God Didn't Make Miracles, A Diffusion Model Did

TikTok this summer has been wall-to-wall angels. I want to be careful here because I'm not interested in arguing about faith, and that's not what this episode is. This episode is about how diffusion models generate hands with six fingers and halos with impossible light sources, what compression does to fine detail in a low-resolution security feed, and why the visual grammar of AI-generated imagery maps so neatly onto the visual grammar of religious iconography that the overlap shouldn't remotely surprise you. Plus let's farm some miracles in the Vatican archives and pray to the digital gods we don't get caught.

Thank you @TheDigitalArtist for the fine cover art @Pixabay