We built flawless idols, then wondered why our hearts feel cheap

I understand why brands adore AI influencers: they never tire, never age, never contradict the script. But that is precisely the danger. When a “personality” is engineered for endless allure, you are not meeting a neighbor, you are consuming a spectacle, and calling the appetite “community.” @Beyond sensual pleasure, Augustine identifies a distinct ‘lust of the eyes’ as vain, unsafe curiosity—a craving to experience and know through the senses even what is ugly or useless—that manifests in morbid spectacles, gratuitous scientific probing, magical practices, and religious demands for signs.

This is the old torrent of human custom, only faster now, and monetized by the minute: exquisite vessels of images, filled with the wine of error, teaching us what to desire without teaching us whom to love. @Augustine offers a stringent critique of ‘the torrent of human custom’ and pagan literary culture, arguing that mythological fictions like those of Homer and Terence, which attribute divine sanction to vice (e.g., Jupiter’s adulteries), normalize immorality and are publicly funded, while the neutral beauty of words is corrupted by being filled with the ‘wine of error’.

A soul cannot be fed by a mask, even a beautiful one.