Comment by amritananda
20 hours 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.
If they’re never digitized then where do you get the originals?
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.