I think AI-"upscaled" videos are as jarring to look at as a newly bought TV before frame smoothing has been disabled. Who seriously thinks this looks better, even if the original is a slightly grainy recording from the 90's?
I was recently sent a link to this recording of a David Bowie & Nine Inch Nails concert, and I got a serious uneasy feeling as if I was on a psychedelic and couldn't quite trust my perception, especially at the 2:00 mark: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Yyx31HPgfs&list=RD7Yyx31HPg...
It turned out that the video was "AI-upscaled" from an original which is really blurry and sometimes has a low frame rate. These are artistic choices, and I think the original, despite being low resolution, captures the intended atmosphere much better: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1X6KF1IkkIc&list=RD1X6KF1Ikk...
We have pretty good cameras and lenses now. We don't need AI to "improve" the quality.
The weird thing is that people are seemingly enjoying this.
Yesterday we went to a store to have a look at a few smartphone for my partner. She primarily wants a good camera above any other parameter. I was seeing her preferring those that were counterfeiting the reality the most: she was like, "look I can zoom and it is still sharp" while obviously there was a delay between zooming and the end result which was a reconstructed, liquid like distorded version similar to the upscaling filters people are using on 8/16bit game console emulators. I was cringing at seeing the person I love the most preferring looking at selfies of picture of us with smoothed faces and a terrible fake bokeh in the background instead of something closer to the reality.
I’m a photographer, and am on a bunch of beginner photography groups.
These groups used to be a mix of people being confused at how their camera worked and wanting help, people wanting tips on how to take better pictures, and sometimes there was requests for editing pictures on their behalf (eg “I found this old black and white faded picture of my great grandparents, can anyone help restore it?”)
These days, 99.9% of the posts are requests that involve synthesizing an entirely new picture out of one or more other pictures. Examples: “can someone bring in my grandpa from this picture into this other family picture?”. Or “I love this photo of me with my kids, but I hate how I look. Can someone take the me from this other picture and put it in there? Also please remove the cups from our hands and the trees in the background, and this is my daughter’s ex boyfriend please also remove him”.
What’s even crazier is that the replies of those threads are filled with dozens of people who evidently just copy pasted the prompt + picture into ChatGPT. The results look terrible… but the OP is always pleased as punch!
People don’t care about “reality”. Pictures have lost their status of “visual record of a past event”* and become “visual interpretation of whatever this person happens to want”.
There’s no putting back the genie in the bottle.
*: yes, you can argue they were never 100% that, but still, that’s effectively what they were.
You've never seen those stands at the boardwalk where artists draw caricatures? They're extremely formulaic and rarely resemble the subjects aside from a few distorted features, but humans have being paying other humans to pump out that slop for ages.
1) This is, amusingly, kind of a shift back to when portraits had to be painted.
2) This seems very similar to me to those weird fuzzy double-exposure, heavily posed portraits that used to be really popular, or in general not that different from going and having family photos taken at a cheap mall photo studio with one of five shitty looking background-tarps.
I suspect there are some interesting class components to that second one (Fussell may even have mentioned it in his book, I can't recall, but it's definitely the kind of thing that probably could have served his analysis) but overall I think the "unwashed masses" have long preferred really shitty, lazily/poorly staged & manipulated photos to authentic ones. Now they can just apply that same aesthetic preference to photos that weren't originally like that.
Young people often ask "what's the point of fine art photography? It's just capturing what I can already see with my eyes, I prefer art like paintings which are more creative and imaginative"
And the answer is often "GOOD photography is about capturing a fleeting moment in time, forever, so that we can enjoy it longer"
But what is happening now is going the other way - people are using photography to be more imaginative, as a creative medium more akin to composing a painting. Transforming reality rather than merely recording it
But people have be editing photos like that before AI and even before Photoshop, I don't see the big deal. What I've seen recently is synthesizing whole new pictures with AI, by training a LoRA on their face and body and asking the AI to create themselves with a specific setting or background.
I value old photographs of my and my family not because they look good or whatever but because they show where we've been and what we've been doing etc. They're documented history. Once you start heavily editing, making them showing things that weren't there, you loose that history. I think that's a loss.
They’re not mutually exclusive though. My wife has our portraits taken about twice a year and sometimes during a vacation or major event. So we have those, we also have tons unedited candid photos we take on a daily basis and never share (or only on a closed platform like a shared Album in iOS Photos), then my wife does a lot of editing and montage stuff for some of the stuff she posts more broadly to SM. I post nothing to SM so can’t speak from personal experiences here, but what I’m saying is there isn’t a single use case anymore. We have the tools at our disposal to just scratch curious itches even when they don’t get posted or shared (which I’d bet is a majority of photos). You’re viewing it as reductive but it’s expansive from what I’ve seen.
Ironically one of our framed photo is my partner and me posing next to an historic building in a pueblo magico in Mexico. A stray dog decided to piss on the wall when my sister in law was taking the picture. She actually realised it and took a second picture but it turned out we like the first one better as it is just much more authentic.
I get what you're saying, but I don't think I entirely agree. If we live in a world where you can't tell if a picture is real or fiction, then it becomes necessary and reasonable to think of all pictures as fiction.
This is only an issue with a single photo or low sample sizes. In the case of family photos, you’d like have a whole bunch of them to reference and could spot inconsistencies more easily. If it becomes so good to be completely indistinguishable from reality, then not sure what the gripe is. You could just as easily think of all pictures as unaltered. It’s a matter of optimism/pessimism or perhaps red pill/blue pill.
Granted, if your grandparents are showing you their vacation pictures from their world travels that never happened, this is a different scenario that is weird and can could happen. It’s a balance of trusting nothing you see while making a few exceptions for your family and whatnot
> If it becomes so good to be completely indistinguishable from reality, then not sure what the gripe is.
Being 100% convincing doesn't make it true. Not being able to tell what's true from what's fake is a self-evident problem. It means you're at risk of forming an invalid view of the world. The only safe approach would be to never believe anything, at which point we've even lost recent history. Madness lies that way.
The motivation behind taking pictures has definitely changed over time. People used to keep them mainly for themselves and their close family. Then they started to share with close and not so close friends. Now they use it to boost their "personal online brand". Yes, it was possible to heavily manipulate pictures with Photoshop, or even in analog photography, but it wouldn't make any sense for most people.
> But people have be editing photos like that before AI and even before Photoshop
Very few people who had the skill, time or money. I think we are now discovering that everybody wants to edit the photos, they just couldn't do it before in what they consider a reasonable amount of effort.
Yes, I agree, but I am specifically looking to understand the above photographer's point. They said the requests they used to get versus what they get today have changed, but I argue that that doesn't make any sense, people have always wanted to edit their photos in the "now" example even back then.
My point is that their "these days" example was already possible 20 to 30 years ago, so if they're just seeing these requests today then they're missing out on what people have wanted even back then.
I'm specifically responding to their point about how "these days" people want different things and I'm saying that they always wanted those things, nothing new about it.
I disagree. My parents generation took photos on point and shoot cameras. They waited a week or longer to get them developed, never really knowing what they took.
These photos ended up stuck to pages in an album to be brought out occasionally, or they were really good, in a frame placed on display. They have pictures from the 80s still out on their mantle.
Maybe once a decade they would go to a studio like at Sears and get a pro to get the whole family together. These would be edited, but also very rare.
Even the thought that they would be taking pictures for anyone else to ever see would rarely cross their minds, let alone the need to make major edits. Regular people simply didn’t have this vanity or need for approval when taking pics like the smartphone era
My parents' generation also took photos but if something was off, they'd ask our photographer relative to edit them. This was over 20 years ago. At least some part of the population did know what photo editing was and did it, either themselves or with the help of someone else.
On the contrary, there is plenty new about it. People’s perception of how much you can change influences how much they ask. Seeing new possibilities gives you new ideas.
You'll see the big deal when you realize that you don't trust absolutely any photos or videos of current events unless the photos are provided by a news source that you trust. You'll see the big deal when you take a picture of something real and show it to a friend who isn't interested because they don't think the thing in the photo actually exists.
I feel the same way. Thankfully there are still obvious signs in case of using LLMs, but it is not always so obvious. I think we may be better off assuming X is fake, and go from there. Sad but what could we do? There are websites that tell you (with a %) whether or not something has been written by an LLM. Unfortunately, however, some of my writings come out false positive. We may need to do improvements on this front, and I believe we will.
Take for instance instagram, youtube shorts and tiktok. I see people watching tons of small either supposedly funny or shocking videos. And people seem to believe they are totally real and not organize/produced content until I challenge them on a number of trivial details that make those videos totally unbelievable they would have been recorded by chance or in an opportunistic manner.
That attitude actually feels a couple of years out of date to me, now the response is often along the lines of, "So what, everything is staged, it's just for fun, get over it and stop being a killjoy".
There's a general belief that nothing is real, but we should still just act, and be influenced by it, as if it were real.
This is wild to me. I take plenty of smartphone photos and have literally never in my life wanted to distort a picture in this way. None of my pictures are ever getting published or being used to promote a product; being a visual record of a past event is exactly what I want out of them. I'm honestly pretty surprised to hear this is turning into such a minority view.
Yes, this is the exact same reason that frame smoothing exists. When you walk into a store, all the TVs are lined up showing some random nature show or sports event, and frame smoothing will make your TV look a little more smooth than the others, even though it completely ruins the content.
It's made for making sales, not for making things actually look good.
It doesn't "ruin the content", it's a psychological issue which would be fixed by more high quality productions actually producing high frame-rate content, so the association reverses.
It seems insane to actively make all content worse, having movies worsened down to a lower frame-rate just because we have a hangover from decades old technology.
It's a shame that Peter Jackson's Hobbit wasn't a great movie. Had it been, then maybe it could have been a better driver of high frame-rate movies.
Your premise to lower (temporal) detail his automatically worse is a naïve view. I’m certain you’re aware that impressionism is a valid, quite successful form of art. Do you think there are any critics who say a Monet painting would be far better if it, just had more detail? Oh if only Van Gough used a smaller brush his paintings would have been so much better! It needs “more k!”.
Film making at 24fps (while originally selected for pragmatic reasons having to do with film cost and sound fidelity) turned out to be a happy accident. It produces an Impressionistic Effect entirely similar to a money painting. 24fps is absolutely not reality. Our brains know it too. The same way they know that those giant brush strokes in a Van Gough painting are also NOT REALITY. Turns out our brains like to be toyed with. Art is just always “trying to document precisely what our senses would have experienced if we were there”.
That is just a false premise and one they misunderstands art in general.
I reject that, it's a product of familiarity being more comfortable.
24fps was not a deliberate choice that was made a century after we previously had high frame-rate. It was a limitation at the time.
Impressionism was a deliberate choice, it came centuries after more detailed paintings were being done. And there were indeed many critics of the movement at the time.
24fps in movies is just banking on the comfortable, the familiar. It isn't art, it's giving people what they expect and not challenging people. It has about as much artistic merit as the N'th Mission impossible movie or MCU movie.
I totally disagree. If you read my statement I specifically stated that 24 was not designed to be impressionism. It was just a happy accident that it worked out that way. We've since tried all sorts of other frame-rates. Slower is to studdery, faster removes the impressionism and starts biasing towards realism. Once you get to 72fps or higher, it's essentially pure reality, and your brain knows it.
Look, detailed photos can be art. Not saying that HFR cannot be art, but we'd all agree that realism and impressionism are simply different forms of art. And often times those who like one, doesn't like the other.
So you have to accept that those are find the appeal of 24fps due to its "different than reality" look, they might easily find HFR material to be "boring and hyper real" in the same way I might look at a crystal clear photo of Paris and think the same, whereas a Monet impression of it, is way more appealing.
I loved the first Hobbit movie, which was the only one that was mostly based on the book. It was the first and unfortunately also the only theater experience that I've ever had, that didn't make me feel frustrated that I couldn't make out anything that was happening in the fast sequences.
Ah! I thought I was the only one who felt movies or series change scenes too fast. I often find myself needing a small pause, when it is in Netflix, to recapitulate with my wife what just happened. This happens even in lawyer dramas like Suites.
I disagree with this. Even if the film is shot in HFR I don't like how it looks.
It's just SOE, soap opera effect, and it has nothing to do with any artifacts from motion smoothing, because the look is the same even if it's filmed in HFR. The only things I like in HFR are sports or maybe home videos. Any sort of movie or TV show where I want the suspension of disbelief, I am still much preferring 24fps.
Of course this is just my opinion, but home theater is a big hobby of mine and so I spend a fairly great deal of time looking at different content and analyzing it and thinking about it and how I feel about it or enjoy it.
Not attempting to take anything away from those who do like HFR, but just saying that it's not for everyone.
At some point it became unacceptably rude to gatekeep, king-make, or be otherwise judgemental of taste. It was at around the same time that subcultures and counterculture melted into an homogenous mass.
I think we lost something in that. Embarrassment can be useful for moving us out of our comfort zones.
One funny thing I've noticed is that software developers (including myself) seem to rebel against it the most. A surprising number of software developers I know shoot film. No digital cameras, they just take photos, get the prints, and they're done.
It seems to be the non-technical people who are most OK with the inauthenticity that comes with AI "enhanced" photos.
May I ask how religious (or woowoo) your partner is?
The number of people who care about having an objectively true understanding of as much of reality as possible is disappointingly small and I suspect that these photo trends are just making that fact more obvious.
The extreme blur here was obviously a creative choice by the director/editor, the rest of the video has lower resolution but it's not nearly that bad (which is why Bowie still looks like himself in other parts of the upscaled video).
The process used to upscale the video has no subtlety, it's just "make everything look crisp, even if you have to create entirely made-up faces".
I remember watching an episode of one of my favorite shows on my parents’ brand new TV, and thought to myself something about this episode is off, like the production is cheap, the acting feels worse, even the dialog is bad.
Over time I noticed everything looks cheaper on their TV.
It is especially bad for animated shows that have made an explicit artistic choice to let (parts of) the animation progress at a lower frame rate. My kids watched "spider-man: across the spider-verse" at a friends place where smoothing was not turned off, and it completely ruined the artistic feel and made the movie feel like a stuttering video game.
Studio Ghibli movies are among the hardest-hit by smoothing. It's jarring how it'll transition between motion-smoothed pans and motion scenes and natural Ghibli animation.
> I found those spiderverse movies really hard to watch because of the low frame rate. I don't think it was artistic, it was cheap.
It was absolutely an artistic choice - Sony spent more per frame on those movies than any previous animated film & the directors knew exactly what they were doing when they chose to animate some parts on every second (or even third) frame.
This is an artistic choice with a variety of film precedents. Its not exactly the same thing, but if you watch this GDC talk about the way that Arc System Works uses 3d to simulate 2d animation, it gets some of the ideas across:
Artists might want to produce a lower framerate just to make something look filmic (eg, 25 frames per second) or hand animated, but it can also be a deliberate stylistic choice for other reasons. Eg, the recentish Mad Max films used subtle undercranking to make action scenes feel more intense, and part of that effect is a more noticeable frames and I think there is a bit of that in the Spiderverse films too.
I mean, it was an artistic choice, and it wasn't cheap at $90m budget. That doesn't mean you're obligated to enjoy the end product by any means, but they were really doing some interesting things! https://medium.com/everythingcg/spider-man-into-the-spider-v...
I think that's a matter of taste, but it definitely doesn't make it easier to watch them when the frame rate randomly switches between low and high all the time :).
I had the exact same experience watching Goodfellas on my parents' TV. It felt like a cheap soap opera and I was thoroughly confused about what's happening. Afterwards I did some research and learned about motion interpolation in modern TVs.
Back when there was a lot of 4x3 on TV, 20 years ago, my parents had their TV set to auto stretch. Why?
Because they felt they were being ripped off, with all that unused space. They paid for widescreen!
Didn't matter that people looked all fat in the face, or that the effect was logarithmic near the edges. A car driving by got wider as it neared the edge of screen!
Nope, only mattered it was widescreen now.
And until I mentioned it, they did not even notice.
When I thought of it, I realised this sort of matches everything. Whether food, or especially politics, nuance is entirely lost on the average person.
I feel, as a place for tech startups, we should realise this. If you plan to market to the public, just drop the nuance. You'll save, be more competitive, and win.
I feel this so much. Despite telling her umpteen times till date, my mom will stretch photos only along one dimension to "fill the space" when writing docs or making slides. It drives me absolutely insane. She doesn't even realize till I tell her that the faces (and people) are stretched or squished too much.
Not to defend her preference, but faces (and everything else) can also look different depending on the focal length of the lens used and the distance from lens to subject, _and most people won't realise_.
> I feel, as a place for tech startups, we should realise this. If you plan to market to the public, just drop the nuance. You'll save, be more competitive, and win.
Do you really want this to be the world we live in? It's just hurting the people who do care about nuance.
Do you really want this to be the world we live in?
No. But I also don't want to go bankrupt.
If I want to make a niche market product, for the discerning consumer, well that's different. But from what I see, that's not even one in a thousand... so best be careful.
One of my pet peeves of the opening scene in Star Trek (2009?) was when the ‘bad guy’ shows up on the monitor, his video is stretched wide to fill the view screen. wtf kind of future is that?!
A few years ago I was playing around with upscaling options in ffmpeg. For my starting point, I used my DVD of The Road Warrior that I bought in 1999, and wasn't particularly well mastered. I applied some filters to remove film grain, and raised the frame rate to 120 fps by inserting artificial interstitial frames.
Firstly, the filter that removed grain from the film also removed grain from the road, the sand, and Mel Gibson's stubble, all of which there's a lot of in the Road Warrior. Everything looked quite a bit too clean.
But the super high frame rate gave the video a hyper-realistic quality. Not realistic in the sense that I'm watching actual post-apocalyptic survivors. Realistic in the sense that I'm looking at what are clearly actors wearing costumes, and it's hard not to imagine the camera and rigging crew standing just out of frame.
An interesting exercise, but not how I want to experience that movie. Having said that, this was my experience just playing around with ffmpeg on my desktop PC. I wouldn't rule out the possibility that a dedicated professional using the right tools (presumably also ffmpeg) could manage a set of adjustments and upscaling processes that really do create a better experience than the original film.
This phenomenon of pushing technology that end consumers don't want, seem to be driven by a simple sequence of incentives: pressure from shareholders to maintain/increase stock price -> pressure on business to increase market share, raise prices, or at least showcase promising future tech -> pressure on PMs to build new features -> combined with developers' desire to try out new technologies -> result: AI chatbots/summaries on things we didn't ask for, touchscreens on car dashboards, AI upscaling etc.
After decades of consumerism, most consumers already have most of what they need/want, so in order to keep selling widgets, corporations must manufacture demand. Enough big screen TVs have already been built and sold to give every American a fully functional 60"+ screen in every room in their residence, enough lightly used ones to go around to completely negate the need to manufacture more. But profit must not go down for any reason, so they must invent gimmicks to push the latest and greatest model onto a public that can't even tell the difference without marketing propaganda.
The entire global economic system depends on the unceasing transformation of natural resources into a stream of disposable crap for the benefit of the ownership class and shareholding leeches. It's obviously unsustainable, but so are the mortal lives of those who benefit from the system. What incentive have they to save a world in which they will no longer have any stake? Better to live out their days in comfort and wealth by cutting down the saplings under whose shade they will never sit.
Failure of 3D TVs was one unprecedented glorious victory of a customer, where customers not buying it indeed led to its disappearance. Otherwise I'm furiously not buying other ridiculous stuff but my consumer decision does nothing.
I don’t think people notice. I don’t own a TV, but twice now I’ve been to some friend’s house and I immediately noticed it on theirs. Both times I explained the Soap Opera effect and suggested disabling the feature. They both agreed, let me do it, and haven’t turned it on again. But I also think that is a mix of trusting me and not caring, I’m not convinced they could really tell the difference.
Tip for those aiming to do the same: Search online for “<tv brand> soap opera effect” and you’re bound to find a website telling you the whereabouts of how to reach the setting. It may not be 100% correct, so be on the lookout for whatever dumb name the manufacturer gave the “feature” (usually described in the same guide you would have found online).
> I got a serious uneasy feeling as if I was on a psychedelic and couldn't quite trust my perception, especially at the 2:00 mark
You weren’t kidding. That bit at 02:06 really makes you start to blink and look closer. The face morphs entirely.
If you watch the average person watch TV, they don’t actually pay attention to it. Everyone is just on their phone. It drives me crazy watching just about anything with people because I look around and no one even has their eyes on the TV. It’s just background noise.
I see this upscaling a lot in Youtube videos about WWII that use very grainy B+W film sources (which themselves aren't using the best sources of) and it just turns the footage into some weird flat paneled cartoonish mess. It's not video anymore, it's an animated approximation.
What makes it uneasy is not only upscaling but they are generating new frames to make it 60fps. 60fps by itself feels fake (check some footage of The Hobbit that tried 48fps). It feels like video games.
It's kinda funny to aim for 60fps because modern video productions will often have 60fps footage that's too sharp and clean. So they heavily post process the videos. You add the film grain and lower the fps to 30 or even 24 (cinema) so it looks much more natural.
The question is if this is just habitual / taste thing. We most likely wouldn't prefer 24fps if the movie industry started with 50fps.
I actually went out of my way to watch The Hobbit at theaters with the 48fps copy because I thought it was incredible despite the wrerched 3D it was paired with. 24fps has always seemed choppy and confusing to me with any kind of action, and The Hobbit was a breath of fresh air
I consider it a genuine shame there's no way to release the 48fps cut on home media.
It is just habitual and I feel it's making movies look terrible, especially panning shots look like a stuttery mess that is almost unwatchable for me at 24 FPS.
> Who seriously thinks this looks better, even if the original is a slightly grainy recording from the 90's?
Whatever you had as a kid feels "natural", these things feel "natural" for new generations.
Same things for a proper file system vs "apps", a teenagers on an ipad will do things you didn't know were possible, put them on windows XP and they won't be able to create a file or a folder, they don't even know what these words mean in the context of computers.
This sounds like two completely different things. I know people from my parent's generation who would say that the scenes on new TV's look "weird" until the motion smoothing is switched off. This is neurological, not generational.
In that case the answer is even simpler: what few young people I know (yes, N = small) have been the loudest in complaining about the feature. They seem to prefer "cinema quality" the same way some people of my generation like vinyl records.
At 2:04 the original deliberately has everyone on stage way out of focus, and the AI upscaler (or the person operating it) decided to just replace it with an in-focus version sporting what looks like late 90s video game characters. That is terrible.
I also think it looks like garbage, but I wonder if maybe it looks better on small mobile screens - where you can't actually see the mangled details, but can perceive that it "looks sharper"
I pulled up a podcast on YouTube the other week of just two people facing the camera and their faces side-by-side the screen. I had to just use audio only. I couldn't actually look at the video. The guest on the show was using some kind of AI filter for his video stream. I guess because he was on a low-quality phone camera, and he thought the filter would be better?? But the result was very disturbing. I almost barfed on my desk when his image came up.
Wow, you're not kidding. In some shots David Bowie barely looks like David Bowie because the algorithm's taken such liberties with the original image to try and make it look sharp.
Not sure if you're serious, but wouldn't it be more efficient to upscale at source and stream the result? Extra bandwidth versus a million TVs all doing the same computation.
I think its preferred to get this kind of smooth unreal effect for services like youtube, but not because it looks better; but rather because it compresses better for storage. Less fine detail overall helps video compression.
I like upscaling and frame interpolation but as always, the TV does not have the hardware to do a good job. If you use neural network models, it works and looks a lot better without looking plastic-like.
It was probably a Technology Connections video or something but I learned that film projectors actually flash each frame 3 times before progressing to the next so the light is flickering 72 times a second, while the image is only changing 24 fps.
You will see the same thing on any online real estate listing. I spend more time wondering why it looks so weird than I do looking at what the picture is attempting to show.
This reminds me of colorized black and white movies from the 90s although I can know imagine AI being used to do that and upscale the past creating new hyper-real versions of the past.
Two root comments (so far) are focusing on YouTube, but the article claims most of the AI was done by Will’s team, using AI to convert stills to video:
> The video features real performances and real audiences, but I believe they were manipulated on two levels:
1. Will Smith’s team generated several short AI image-to-video clips from professionally-shot audience photos
2. YouTube post-processed the resulting Shorts montage, making everything look so much worse
You can see the side-by-side [1] of the YouTube post-processing, and, while definitely altering the original, isn’t what’s causing most of the really bad AI artifacts.
Most of what YouTube appears to be doing is making it less blurry, sometimes successfully, and sometimes not. And, even with that, it is only done on Shorts.
Yeah, it’s definitely subtle, for the most part. But if you pause it and move it around frames, you can definitely see where post processing attempted to sharpen some of the out-of-focus parts.
But, again, the AI artifacts are from taking still shots and using AI to generate videos, which was done separately/intentionally by Will’s team (according to the article).
I wonder if there are two people reading this and wishing that Coldplay had employed this technology earlier this summer?
On a serious note, I find this trend of shoving AI everywhere pretty disturbing. For instance, I used to enjoy Spotify’s “Discover Weekly” feature to find new music, but these days it’s offering so many AI generated songs the experience is pretty jarring.
I've been really tempted to drop out of Spotify and start buying CDs from my local music shop instead. Then I can get a USB CD reader and start building my own little music collection. In the pursuit of keeping "up to date" and having access to "everything" we've totally lost touch with the human element of sharing music.
Yeah, I can see how that would feel jarring. Music discovery is supposed to feel like serendipity—stumbling across a track you didn’t know you needed—so when AI-generated filler creeps into that space, it can cheapen the experience.
Spotify hasn’t officially said they’re flooding “Discover Weekly” with AI songs, but there’s definitely been a surge of AI-produced music uploaded to streaming platforms in the past year. Since Spotify’s algorithms don’t always distinguish between human and synthetic content, it can end up mixing both in your recommendations. That’s especially noticeable in genres where production is relatively easy for AI to mimic (ambient, lo-fi, EDM, generic pop).
I think the larger unease you’re feeling—AI creeping into places where you expected human curation or artistry—is being shared by a lot of listeners. There’s a debate brewing about whether platforms should label AI music clearly, or even let users opt out of algorithmic recommendations that include it.
Do you want me to check what tools or tricks people are using to filter out AI-generated songs on Spotify (or elsewhere), so you can get back to the human-made discovery experience?
(Sorry, I couldn't help myself with this one. I'll see myself out now.)
If I were a marketing person I would also make genuine images look AI generated for the free publicity. Nothing gets attention like mistakes or fakes. The fact that they aren't actually fake means there is no downside for WS and team. I once spoke to a social media manager for a large brand and he said they intentionally put typos in posts on a semi regular basis and it always results in more post engagement (people correcting the typo).
I’m sure they “consented” by the fine print on the ticket checkout screen and some form of signs at the venue saying “by entering you consent to be filmed etc etc etc”
Not that I think that’s valid morally but they are probably covered from a legal angle.
Please excuse any perceived tone in my reply. I'm furious but not at you, and I've re-drafted this several times and I can't even tell what tone it conveys any more. I appreciate your thoughtful response and you're likely right in that they've likely ticket a box or walked past a sign or whatever, as we always used to for photos and video. And you've explicitly noted you're not commenting on the morality of it.
I'm certainly not saying you're wrong. Although you might be, if the specific country has laws around deepfakes that don't explicitly specify they need to be sexually explicit to be illegal.
Or if you're not allowed to bury ridiculous stuff in small print.
I've just checked the terms and conditions of entry for the next venue I'm going to, and you're right that buried in the T&Cs of entry is:
>By entering the Venue you agree to your actual or simulated likeness being included for no fee within any film, photograph, audio and/or audio-visual recording to be exploited in any and all media for any purpose at any time throughout the world. This includes filming by the police or security staff which may be carried out for the security of customers or the prevention of crime. However, you may object to such use by specific request to privacy@livenation.co.uk .
The signage for the above venue did not make this clear last time I was there. I wonder if that was the case for the venues involved?
But there's no way people walking in the venue can reasonably be expected to have given informed consent to the artist producing deepfakes of them.
I don't even think there is this much thought involved.
There's two things happening. There are true believers who think that AI is legitimately magic and should be put into every product and then there are people who are putting AI into every product because their director or VP thinks that AI is legitimately magic and is insisting that they put it in every product. Brainstorming sessions aren't "how can we solve problem X for users" but are instead "where can AI change our product."
>
Some PM in Youtube: “ yes let’s make it harder to tell real videos from AI to make people who don’t know better more susceptible and accepting of it”
This can backfire, perhaps making people believe that real, important news is in reality AI-generated to brainwash them, thus making people less susceptible, and more disbelieving.
I have no doubt that will happen. And bad actors will definitely try to use “it was AI” to discredit real things they’ve done. Musk as already tried to pull that stunt.
> The whole point is to make people believe in nothing. When all news is fake, no news matter.
This does not change my point that this is a dangerous game to play: if people believe in nothing, they will also not believe in what "those in power" or the government wants them to believe. People who have no trust in such entities have a lower "emotional barrier" to overcome to turn against such entities.
My hardware/software or my eyes are borked because I cannot tell much of a difference between YouTube vs Instagram side-by-side. Gosh. If it is not my eyes, what are the recommendations? What is the top 1 (or 5) reasons I cannot see it if it is not my eyes? Do I need to upgrade my monitor? I have a relatively recent GPU but it is not a beast and I use a HDMI -> VGA converter.
The pictures, however, look god-awful! I presume the video is filled with stuff like these.
The videos are more subtle and it's not apparent in every frame. Look for things in the background snapping into and out of focus, weird textures appearing on Will's head and neck, and people's faces looking unnaturally sharp at the edges, while their skin is uncannily smooth (sort of like Max Headroom.)
The "upscaling" significantly changes the content of the picture, altering half of the faces, their expressions, whether eyes are closed, mouths open, etc, on top of making it actually HARDER to see details.
The "upscaling" on android smartphone cameras has always been similarly trash. There is always some odd fractal-looking noise filter added.
Who is actually asking for this stuff?
Theres not a single person i know in my life who will want this as a consumer. WHY does the world keep doing things that are so complicated and unnecessary.
Sometimes countries get involved in military conflicts so that they can test their hardware and learn important lessons for the next big war. They are building the leadership, logistics and institutional knowledge for when it's really needed.
Perhaps it's Google warming up their teams for when they have a proper use of their technology and know-how.
Before AI was a thing, that same sentiment was true for almost every startup, especially the ones that had "get" in their domain name.
Yet here we are.
Seriously, who's idea was this? It can't be a money saving feature; surely it costs more to upscale all these videos than to just host the HD version.
And even if you argue it can be used only on low res videos to provide a "better experience", the resulting distortion of reality should be very concerning.
In a couple of years, they can go into same junk drawer of sixth finger prosthetics (generative AI problem) and 5-eyes masks (face recognition problem).
This is being unnecessarily pedantic. They're saying "yes we're doing post-processing, but that's not technically generative AI."
Personally I couldn't care less about what they call it, I care that it makes the same video look more artifical on YouTube than they look elsewhere.
> Hi! I'm a tech nerd and I try to be precise about the terminology I use
> GenAI typically refers to technologies like transformers and large language models, which are relatively new
> Upscaling typically refers to taking one resolution (like SD/480p) and making it look good at a higher resolution (like HD/1080p)
> This isn't using GenAI or doing any upscaling
> It's using the kind of machine learning you experience with computational photography on smartphones, for example, and it's not changing the resolution
I agree with The Verge here in that it is probably using a diffusion model somewhere, and that it is splitting hairs to say that it is not generative AI. The artifacts are very "diffusion".
There's no strict definition of these things, the quote is from YT and they're saying something like this isn't that _bad_ generative AI that people are worried about, this is just good old fashioned wholesome machine learning techniques.
I wonder if the fact that the original video was AI generated made the upscaling look worse than it would on a real video? Not that it can certainly be detected, but an actual video is likely different from an AI generated in ways that it seems like could lead astray their "computational photography" processing.
Soon you won't be able to tell the difference between AI generated and 'real' content, since the 'real' content will be all processed by AI automatically. Quality in -> Garbage out.
Already happening. Take a photo on your phone of something at a distance at maximum zoom. The amount of digital processing going on is crazy. People didn't want blurriness so instead these highly zoomed photos now look like impressionist paintings.
The most incredible part about this story is that Will Smith is still a performing (and touring???) musician with any audience at all, AI or otherwise. I thought he was an actor now. Wut happened?
I think it was confusing to me as well because this guy is some sort of 90's legend, and I do not understand what kind of relevance he might still have, especially on anybody under 35. It's not like he successfully transition into some kind of cultural-relevant behemoth such as Ozzy Osborne or Snoop Dogg, he kind of plateau'd at least a decade ago, but potentially more...
I used to watch and enjoy the Fresh Prince, but you couldn't offer me enough money to go to Will Smith concert, because, why the hell would I do that...
People over 35 are the people with money. I can't imagine a bunch of 16 year olds paying £300 to go and see Oasis in the 90s, but those 16 year olds are now in their 40s and now have money and an opportunity to live their adolescent dream.
he did plateau, but he did achieve superstar status. people who achieve less still do “retirement” tours (to pay the bills) and book large crowds decades later.
I'm not sure about this specific instance, but AI generated movies will absolutely be the future, when you can create the exact shots you want with stability of the foreground, background, and characters, and edit it all together, it'll be an explosion of creativity just as with image generation currently.
To be clear, I don't think it'll be telling an AI to "create me a movie with X, Y, and Z" because AI reasoning is not there yet, but for the raw video generation, it's progressing steadily, as seen in r/aivideo.
I don't exactly disagree, but I do suggest reading "Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art" by Lewis Hyde.
There is a reasonable argument to be made that a lot of art is enlivened by the cantankerous, unpredictable and unyielding nature of the media we use to create art. I don't think this is a necessary feature of art per se, but I do think limitations often help humans create good art and that eliminating them often produces things which feel tossed off, trivial, thoughtless.
I think for commercial produces creating "the exact shot you want" might be what shareholders demand of you. But many artists don't set out to create "the exact shot they want," they set out to collaborate with the world to create an impression that captures both their intent and the unpredictable substance of the situation in whatever sense that might mean.
> […] it'll be an explosion of creativity just as with image generation currently.
I'm mostly seeing people who lack the skills or means to create their own works go nuts with prompting gen-AI tools, but it rarely strikes me as creative in either the 'having the ability to create' sense — they've outsourced that — or the 'original, expressive, imaginative' sense.
They don't have the mechanical means, yes, but they decide what to create so it'd be the latter, not sure why you think it's not; the AI isn't independently coming up with ideas and generating the media. Plus with ComfyUI, I'd say there's some of the former too, similar to how music producers aren't literally playing each instrument that's simulated in their software, but they do assemble it together.
Creativity is more than just deciding that you want 'a space opera, but with an order of knights who yield swords that glow, bad guy looks like a Japanese samurai, reimagined in a 1970s futuristic style.'
Creativity is not just having the idea, it's bearing that to fruition in you own manner (or that of a group of people). Gen-AI outsources the 'creativity' needed to get what it generates. The prompt wrangler provides only the prompt; the rest is drawn from the training data.
Are collages creative? What and is ones "own manner?" Does it require using one's bare hands, or do computers count? Does Photoshop count? There is nothing fundamentally different, 20 years ago people were harping over the Adobe suite too.
The way people are using gen AI is way more creative than typing in a prompt, and it is no different than electronic music producers, it's an arrangement of discrete elements they do not necessarily produce themselves.
The line between movie and games will blur. Once you can do generative movies, you can do games, and vice versa, there's no obvious delineation, and the technical problem is heavily overlapping. Games just has some scoped control inputs, like this: https://demo.dynamicslab.ai/chaos
If by "game" you mean running around aimlessly in a generic fantasy world, and by "movie" you mean animated pictures, then sure. But that's not my definition of either of these things.
> it'll be an explosion of creativity just as with image generation currently.
I haven't seen anything breathtaking yet, just a tsunami of slop. Arguably we already had a video tsunami of slop, you just have log in into netflix to witness it.
For a long time I disliked the term "content" to describe photos/movies/art/&c. but now I feel it's a very appropriate term, an infinite amount of meaningless "content" to fill bottomless "containers"
Nope. Limitations feed creativity. When you have unlimited power/reesources, you end up with unlimited slop. One of the reasons why old movies were better on average - now we get so many average movies with no lasting effect. Another one, slightly orthogonal - a golden ring or rolex in a neatly designed photo shoot vs a middle eastern head of state's "throne room". When you have something in limited quantities, you get the best out of it - when it's unlimited you go crazy.
Survivorship bias, there is no indication that older movies were better on average. While I can agree that constraints breed creativity as they say, the opposite can also be true; look at software, one can also theoretically code an unlimited number of things, and from that we get people creating software and connecting devices to a never before seen level of scale and creativity.
Agreed that technology opens up possibilities. If we continue on the movie analogy, moving from practical effects to CGI opened up possibilities - however it still had limitations (realism, uncanny valley, cost, render time etc.) - which pushed people to be strike a balance. However AI generated stuff gives you unlimited possibilities - whatever you imagine, becomes the scene. I recently saw a AI-augmented tourism video of a major tourist destination - it was vomit inducing. Of course, one may argue that it's just lack of art direction - same effect could be had with more traditional methods, but I still believe cost / possibilities constraints pushed people in the right direction. Maybe it's the luddite in me talking.
I think the biggest takeaway for people in the industry is that the reaction to perceived AI videography is overwhelmingly negative. Using AI to generate footage of real people immediately makes watchers suspect something needs to be covered up or counterfeited. People know what reality looks like, and sloppily subverting it will never be popular.
So... the videos showing the difference between the AI-tainted youtube version and the supposedly untainted instagram version are hosted on... youtube?
There's no risk to reputation. You get a massive rage boost then reveal that "a social media contractor used authentic crowd photographs in an unauthorized manner and is no longer employed by the company". You reveal the photos, everyone either celebrates the contractor getting canned or that this wasn't AI and you get huge lift.
People are suckers. You can tell them you are going to do this, do it, and they'll still fall for it. Don't tell them and they'll think better of themselves and of you for obeying them (cf fictional firing) and you're done!
The upscaling seems to be Google doing it without permission of the original uploader. Google however are unaccountable, you can’t complain otherwise you’ll be exiled
I wonder if it had the same bad effect on other content (surely they tested it first and thought it would be useful!). Maybe double AI reinforces itself somehow?
From a PR perspective, I wonder why YouTube is at the same time forcing unwanted AI features down people's throats[1], a move that many companies now do to drum up their perceived AI competence, but THEN at the same time, when asked, also downplaying this use of AI by splitting words.
The combination of the two confuses me. If this was about shareholders, they'd hype up the use of AI, not downplay it. And if this was about users, they'd simply disable this shit.
[1] I mean, they're sacrificing Google Search of all things to push their AI crap. Also, as a bilingual YouTube user, AI-translated titles and descriptions make the site almost unusable now. In addition to some moronic PM forcing this feature onto users, they somehow also seem to have implemented the worst translation model in the industry. The results are often utterly incomprehensible, and there's no way to turn this off.
The customers are advertisers and marketers. The product is access to the userbase. This is how we arrive where we are at today, where major clients have made significant investments into AI and expect further return on that investment through proliferation of the technology, while the users could not care less or even balk at it. But we are also at a time where there is no viable alternative to the monopolied corners of the internet such as youtube any longer, so the userbase has nowhere to flee if they even wanted to.
I find it hilarious that the Youtube spokespersons go out of their way to clarify that this is "not the bad GenAI shit that we know everyone hates but the good kind, you know, machine learning and stuff, you know, trust us"
The Youtube liason statement is truly something to behold. It's not "upscaling" it's "unblurring". There's no genai, just "traditional machine learning". Oh, phew! I wouldn't want to have misidentified post-processing as unblurring when it was really upscaling.
I think we may see more of this which, to be blunt, I would say are stupid equivocations that are orthogonal to the actual concern, namely that it violates a fundamental trust that images represent something that really happened. We saw this already with Samsung's headspinning justification of their post-processing a fake moon.
Strap in for more JV debate team level "gosh what is reality anyway" equivocations, which I suspect will become increasingly prevalent.
They're not blurring the lines, they're lying. They're generating video that didn't happen and passing it off as real video of events that actually happened. That's lying. Lying a little bit is lying.
This is due to “upscaling”, I remember before the while AI bubble craziness there was a software I used that would upscale images pretty well, except if it has little details like that it would be turned into the mushy stuff you see in the article.
I think AI-"upscaled" videos are as jarring to look at as a newly bought TV before frame smoothing has been disabled. Who seriously thinks this looks better, even if the original is a slightly grainy recording from the 90's?
I was recently sent a link to this recording of a David Bowie & Nine Inch Nails concert, and I got a serious uneasy feeling as if I was on a psychedelic and couldn't quite trust my perception, especially at the 2:00 mark: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Yyx31HPgfs&list=RD7Yyx31HPg...
It turned out that the video was "AI-upscaled" from an original which is really blurry and sometimes has a low frame rate. These are artistic choices, and I think the original, despite being low resolution, captures the intended atmosphere much better: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1X6KF1IkkIc&list=RD1X6KF1Ikk...
We have pretty good cameras and lenses now. We don't need AI to "improve" the quality.
The weird thing is that people are seemingly enjoying this.
Yesterday we went to a store to have a look at a few smartphone for my partner. She primarily wants a good camera above any other parameter. I was seeing her preferring those that were counterfeiting the reality the most: she was like, "look I can zoom and it is still sharp" while obviously there was a delay between zooming and the end result which was a reconstructed, liquid like distorded version similar to the upscaling filters people are using on 8/16bit game console emulators. I was cringing at seeing the person I love the most preferring looking at selfies of picture of us with smoothed faces and a terrible fake bokeh in the background instead of something closer to the reality.
I’m a photographer, and am on a bunch of beginner photography groups.
These groups used to be a mix of people being confused at how their camera worked and wanting help, people wanting tips on how to take better pictures, and sometimes there was requests for editing pictures on their behalf (eg “I found this old black and white faded picture of my great grandparents, can anyone help restore it?”)
These days, 99.9% of the posts are requests that involve synthesizing an entirely new picture out of one or more other pictures. Examples: “can someone bring in my grandpa from this picture into this other family picture?”. Or “I love this photo of me with my kids, but I hate how I look. Can someone take the me from this other picture and put it in there? Also please remove the cups from our hands and the trees in the background, and this is my daughter’s ex boyfriend please also remove him”.
What’s even crazier is that the replies of those threads are filled with dozens of people who evidently just copy pasted the prompt + picture into ChatGPT. The results look terrible… but the OP is always pleased as punch!
People don’t care about “reality”. Pictures have lost their status of “visual record of a past event”* and become “visual interpretation of whatever this person happens to want”.
There’s no putting back the genie in the bottle.
*: yes, you can argue they were never 100% that, but still, that’s effectively what they were.
"I'm delighted by this picture of some weird cartoon people that are in the same pose as my grandparents" puzzles me deeply, also.
You've never seen those stands at the boardwalk where artists draw caricatures? They're extremely formulaic and rarely resemble the subjects aside from a few distorted features, but humans have being paying other humans to pump out that slop for ages.
The difference is that the AI results are accepted as real photos restored, not the caricatures that they are.
https://www.facebook.com/groups/842315653616542/posts/149825...
Random example I just found in a group called "Photo Restoration Facebook Group"
1) This is, amusingly, kind of a shift back to when portraits had to be painted.
2) This seems very similar to me to those weird fuzzy double-exposure, heavily posed portraits that used to be really popular, or in general not that different from going and having family photos taken at a cheap mall photo studio with one of five shitty looking background-tarps.
I suspect there are some interesting class components to that second one (Fussell may even have mentioned it in his book, I can't recall, but it's definitely the kind of thing that probably could have served his analysis) but overall I think the "unwashed masses" have long preferred really shitty, lazily/poorly staged & manipulated photos to authentic ones. Now they can just apply that same aesthetic preference to photos that weren't originally like that.
Young people often ask "what's the point of fine art photography? It's just capturing what I can already see with my eyes, I prefer art like paintings which are more creative and imaginative"
And the answer is often "GOOD photography is about capturing a fleeting moment in time, forever, so that we can enjoy it longer"
But what is happening now is going the other way - people are using photography to be more imaginative, as a creative medium more akin to composing a painting. Transforming reality rather than merely recording it
But people have be editing photos like that before AI and even before Photoshop, I don't see the big deal. What I've seen recently is synthesizing whole new pictures with AI, by training a LoRA on their face and body and asking the AI to create themselves with a specific setting or background.
I value old photographs of my and my family not because they look good or whatever but because they show where we've been and what we've been doing etc. They're documented history. Once you start heavily editing, making them showing things that weren't there, you loose that history. I think that's a loss.
They’re not mutually exclusive though. My wife has our portraits taken about twice a year and sometimes during a vacation or major event. So we have those, we also have tons unedited candid photos we take on a daily basis and never share (or only on a closed platform like a shared Album in iOS Photos), then my wife does a lot of editing and montage stuff for some of the stuff she posts more broadly to SM. I post nothing to SM so can’t speak from personal experiences here, but what I’m saying is there isn’t a single use case anymore. We have the tools at our disposal to just scratch curious itches even when they don’t get posted or shared (which I’d bet is a majority of photos). You’re viewing it as reductive but it’s expansive from what I’ve seen.
Ironically one of our framed photo is my partner and me posing next to an historic building in a pueblo magico in Mexico. A stray dog decided to piss on the wall when my sister in law was taking the picture. She actually realised it and took a second picture but it turned out we like the first one better as it is just much more authentic.
> They’re not mutually exclusive though.
I get what you're saying, but I don't think I entirely agree. If we live in a world where you can't tell if a picture is real or fiction, then it becomes necessary and reasonable to think of all pictures as fiction.
This is only an issue with a single photo or low sample sizes. In the case of family photos, you’d like have a whole bunch of them to reference and could spot inconsistencies more easily. If it becomes so good to be completely indistinguishable from reality, then not sure what the gripe is. You could just as easily think of all pictures as unaltered. It’s a matter of optimism/pessimism or perhaps red pill/blue pill.
Granted, if your grandparents are showing you their vacation pictures from their world travels that never happened, this is a different scenario that is weird and can could happen. It’s a balance of trusting nothing you see while making a few exceptions for your family and whatnot
> If it becomes so good to be completely indistinguishable from reality, then not sure what the gripe is.
Being 100% convincing doesn't make it true. Not being able to tell what's true from what's fake is a self-evident problem. It means you're at risk of forming an invalid view of the world. The only safe approach would be to never believe anything, at which point we've even lost recent history. Madness lies that way.
The motivation behind taking pictures has definitely changed over time. People used to keep them mainly for themselves and their close family. Then they started to share with close and not so close friends. Now they use it to boost their "personal online brand". Yes, it was possible to heavily manipulate pictures with Photoshop, or even in analog photography, but it wouldn't make any sense for most people.
> But people have be editing photos like that before AI and even before Photoshop
Very few people who had the skill, time or money. I think we are now discovering that everybody wants to edit the photos, they just couldn't do it before in what they consider a reasonable amount of effort.
Yes, I agree, but I am specifically looking to understand the above photographer's point. They said the requests they used to get versus what they get today have changed, but I argue that that doesn't make any sense, people have always wanted to edit their photos in the "now" example even back then.
It totally makes sense that people don't request things they don't expect to be possible.
My point is that their "these days" example was already possible 20 to 30 years ago, so if they're just seeing these requests today then they're missing out on what people have wanted even back then.
In other words: this is a complaint about how cheap modified pictures, that look real at first glance, are.
People were pirating before napster, but napster made it easy, accessable, and let people do it with little to no barrier.
It's the same with this.. yes photo editing could always be done, but it's far easier now to get better results. It's accessibility changes the game
I'm specifically responding to their point about how "these days" people want different things and I'm saying that they always wanted those things, nothing new about it.
I disagree. My parents generation took photos on point and shoot cameras. They waited a week or longer to get them developed, never really knowing what they took.
These photos ended up stuck to pages in an album to be brought out occasionally, or they were really good, in a frame placed on display. They have pictures from the 80s still out on their mantle.
Maybe once a decade they would go to a studio like at Sears and get a pro to get the whole family together. These would be edited, but also very rare.
Even the thought that they would be taking pictures for anyone else to ever see would rarely cross their minds, let alone the need to make major edits. Regular people simply didn’t have this vanity or need for approval when taking pics like the smartphone era
My parents' generation also took photos but if something was off, they'd ask our photographer relative to edit them. This was over 20 years ago. At least some part of the population did know what photo editing was and did it, either themselves or with the help of someone else.
On the contrary, there is plenty new about it. People’s perception of how much you can change influences how much they ask. Seeing new possibilities gives you new ideas.
You'll see the big deal when you realize that you don't trust absolutely any photos or videos of current events unless the photos are provided by a news source that you trust. You'll see the big deal when you take a picture of something real and show it to a friend who isn't interested because they don't think the thing in the photo actually exists.
I generally love AI.
But I lament these blurred lines of reality. Is this photo real? Was this reply ChatGPT or did they actually write it?
It makes me feel uneasy.
I feel the same way. Thankfully there are still obvious signs in case of using LLMs, but it is not always so obvious. I think we may be better off assuming X is fake, and go from there. Sad but what could we do? There are websites that tell you (with a %) whether or not something has been written by an LLM. Unfortunately, however, some of my writings come out false positive. We may need to do improvements on this front, and I believe we will.
reality can be faked even without use of LLMs.
Take for instance instagram, youtube shorts and tiktok. I see people watching tons of small either supposedly funny or shocking videos. And people seem to believe they are totally real and not organize/produced content until I challenge them on a number of trivial details that make those videos totally unbelievable they would have been recorded by chance or in an opportunistic manner.
That attitude actually feels a couple of years out of date to me, now the response is often along the lines of, "So what, everything is staged, it's just for fun, get over it and stop being a killjoy".
There's a general belief that nothing is real, but we should still just act, and be influenced by it, as if it were real.
This is wild to me. I take plenty of smartphone photos and have literally never in my life wanted to distort a picture in this way. None of my pictures are ever getting published or being used to promote a product; being a visual record of a past event is exactly what I want out of them. I'm honestly pretty surprised to hear this is turning into such a minority view.
No wonder why Google says:
“Generate, transform and edit images with simple text prompts, or combine multiple images to create something new. All in Gemini.“
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45026719
Yes, this is the exact same reason that frame smoothing exists. When you walk into a store, all the TVs are lined up showing some random nature show or sports event, and frame smoothing will make your TV look a little more smooth than the others, even though it completely ruins the content.
It's made for making sales, not for making things actually look good.
It doesn't "ruin the content", it's a psychological issue which would be fixed by more high quality productions actually producing high frame-rate content, so the association reverses.
It seems insane to actively make all content worse, having movies worsened down to a lower frame-rate just because we have a hangover from decades old technology.
It's a shame that Peter Jackson's Hobbit wasn't a great movie. Had it been, then maybe it could have been a better driver of high frame-rate movies.
Your premise to lower (temporal) detail his automatically worse is a naïve view. I’m certain you’re aware that impressionism is a valid, quite successful form of art. Do you think there are any critics who say a Monet painting would be far better if it, just had more detail? Oh if only Van Gough used a smaller brush his paintings would have been so much better! It needs “more k!”.
Film making at 24fps (while originally selected for pragmatic reasons having to do with film cost and sound fidelity) turned out to be a happy accident. It produces an Impressionistic Effect entirely similar to a money painting. 24fps is absolutely not reality. Our brains know it too. The same way they know that those giant brush strokes in a Van Gough painting are also NOT REALITY. Turns out our brains like to be toyed with. Art is just always “trying to document precisely what our senses would have experienced if we were there”.
That is just a false premise and one they misunderstands art in general.
I reject that, it's a product of familiarity being more comfortable.
24fps was not a deliberate choice that was made a century after we previously had high frame-rate. It was a limitation at the time.
Impressionism was a deliberate choice, it came centuries after more detailed paintings were being done. And there were indeed many critics of the movement at the time.
24fps in movies is just banking on the comfortable, the familiar. It isn't art, it's giving people what they expect and not challenging people. It has about as much artistic merit as the N'th Mission impossible movie or MCU movie.
I totally disagree. If you read my statement I specifically stated that 24 was not designed to be impressionism. It was just a happy accident that it worked out that way. We've since tried all sorts of other frame-rates. Slower is to studdery, faster removes the impressionism and starts biasing towards realism. Once you get to 72fps or higher, it's essentially pure reality, and your brain knows it.
Look, detailed photos can be art. Not saying that HFR cannot be art, but we'd all agree that realism and impressionism are simply different forms of art. And often times those who like one, doesn't like the other.
So you have to accept that those are find the appeal of 24fps due to its "different than reality" look, they might easily find HFR material to be "boring and hyper real" in the same way I might look at a crystal clear photo of Paris and think the same, whereas a Monet impression of it, is way more appealing.
I loved the first Hobbit movie, which was the only one that was mostly based on the book. It was the first and unfortunately also the only theater experience that I've ever had, that didn't make me feel frustrated that I couldn't make out anything that was happening in the fast sequences.
Ah! I thought I was the only one who felt movies or series change scenes too fast. I often find myself needing a small pause, when it is in Netflix, to recapitulate with my wife what just happened. This happens even in lawyer dramas like Suites.
Maybe we're just old XD
Lower framerate isn't worse, it's just different.
But the artifacts introduced by TV frame interpolation absolutely can ruin the content completely.
I disagree with this. Even if the film is shot in HFR I don't like how it looks.
It's just SOE, soap opera effect, and it has nothing to do with any artifacts from motion smoothing, because the look is the same even if it's filmed in HFR. The only things I like in HFR are sports or maybe home videos. Any sort of movie or TV show where I want the suspension of disbelief, I am still much preferring 24fps.
Of course this is just my opinion, but home theater is a big hobby of mine and so I spend a fairly great deal of time looking at different content and analyzing it and thinking about it and how I feel about it or enjoy it.
Not attempting to take anything away from those who do like HFR, but just saying that it's not for everyone.
At some point it became unacceptably rude to gatekeep, king-make, or be otherwise judgemental of taste. It was at around the same time that subcultures and counterculture melted into an homogenous mass.
I think we lost something in that. Embarrassment can be useful for moving us out of our comfort zones.
It is weird.
One funny thing I've noticed is that software developers (including myself) seem to rebel against it the most. A surprising number of software developers I know shoot film. No digital cameras, they just take photos, get the prints, and they're done.
It seems to be the non-technical people who are most OK with the inauthenticity that comes with AI "enhanced" photos.
Couldn't you pretty reasonably create Bokeh algorithmically, since it's destroying information rather than creating it?
May I ask how religious (or woowoo) your partner is?
The number of people who care about having an objectively true understanding of as much of reality as possible is disappointingly small and I suspect that these photo trends are just making that fact more obvious.
That's hilarious https://i.imgur.com/TVfncya.png
That's insane. Here's the same-ish frame from the original: https://imgur.com/a/dWS20oP
The extreme blur here was obviously a creative choice by the director/editor, the rest of the video has lower resolution but it's not nearly that bad (which is why Bowie still looks like himself in other parts of the upscaled video).
The process used to upscale the video has no subtlety, it's just "make everything look crisp, even if you have to create entirely made-up faces".
Seems like they ignored the non-square pixel aspect ratio as well for the upscaling, which may have changed face shapes as well.
Between 2:07 and 2:08, the guy on the right loses his glasses. Over the course of a couple frames, they just fade into nothingness.
I remember watching an episode of one of my favorite shows on my parents’ brand new TV, and thought to myself something about this episode is off, like the production is cheap, the acting feels worse, even the dialog is bad.
Over time I noticed everything looks cheaper on their TV.
It was the auto-smoothing.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soap_opera_effect
It is especially bad for animated shows that have made an explicit artistic choice to let (parts of) the animation progress at a lower frame rate. My kids watched "spider-man: across the spider-verse" at a friends place where smoothing was not turned off, and it completely ruined the artistic feel and made the movie feel like a stuttering video game.
Studio Ghibli movies are among the hardest-hit by smoothing. It's jarring how it'll transition between motion-smoothed pans and motion scenes and natural Ghibli animation.
I found those spiderverse movies really hard to watch because of the low frame rate. I don't think it was artistic, it was cheap.
> I found those spiderverse movies really hard to watch because of the low frame rate. I don't think it was artistic, it was cheap.
It was absolutely an artistic choice - Sony spent more per frame on those movies than any previous animated film & the directors knew exactly what they were doing when they chose to animate some parts on every second (or even third) frame.
This is an artistic choice with a variety of film precedents. Its not exactly the same thing, but if you watch this GDC talk about the way that Arc System Works uses 3d to simulate 2d animation, it gets some of the ideas across:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhGjCzxJV3E
Artists might want to produce a lower framerate just to make something look filmic (eg, 25 frames per second) or hand animated, but it can also be a deliberate stylistic choice for other reasons. Eg, the recentish Mad Max films used subtle undercranking to make action scenes feel more intense, and part of that effect is a more noticeable frames and I think there is a bit of that in the Spiderverse films too.
I mean, it was an artistic choice, and it wasn't cheap at $90m budget. That doesn't mean you're obligated to enjoy the end product by any means, but they were really doing some interesting things! https://medium.com/everythingcg/spider-man-into-the-spider-v...
I think that's a matter of taste, but it definitely doesn't make it easier to watch them when the frame rate randomly switches between low and high all the time :).
That is a fantastic movie, btw
I had the exact same experience watching Goodfellas on my parents' TV. It felt like a cheap soap opera and I was thoroughly confused about what's happening. Afterwards I did some research and learned about motion interpolation in modern TVs.
Back when there was a lot of 4x3 on TV, 20 years ago, my parents had their TV set to auto stretch. Why?
Because they felt they were being ripped off, with all that unused space. They paid for widescreen!
Didn't matter that people looked all fat in the face, or that the effect was logarithmic near the edges. A car driving by got wider as it neared the edge of screen!
Nope, only mattered it was widescreen now.
And until I mentioned it, they did not even notice.
When I thought of it, I realised this sort of matches everything. Whether food, or especially politics, nuance is entirely lost on the average person.
I feel, as a place for tech startups, we should realise this. If you plan to market to the public, just drop the nuance. You'll save, be more competitive, and win.
I feel this so much. Despite telling her umpteen times till date, my mom will stretch photos only along one dimension to "fill the space" when writing docs or making slides. It drives me absolutely insane. She doesn't even realize till I tell her that the faces (and people) are stretched or squished too much.
Not to defend her preference, but faces (and everything else) can also look different depending on the focal length of the lens used and the distance from lens to subject, _and most people won't realise_.
> I feel, as a place for tech startups, we should realise this. If you plan to market to the public, just drop the nuance. You'll save, be more competitive, and win.
Do you really want this to be the world we live in? It's just hurting the people who do care about nuance.
Do you really want this to be the world we live in?
No. But I also don't want to go bankrupt.
If I want to make a niche market product, for the discerning consumer, well that's different. But from what I see, that's not even one in a thousand... so best be careful.
It's already the world we live in
One of my pet peeves of the opening scene in Star Trek (2009?) was when the ‘bad guy’ shows up on the monitor, his video is stretched wide to fill the view screen. wtf kind of future is that?!
A few years ago I was playing around with upscaling options in ffmpeg. For my starting point, I used my DVD of The Road Warrior that I bought in 1999, and wasn't particularly well mastered. I applied some filters to remove film grain, and raised the frame rate to 120 fps by inserting artificial interstitial frames.
Firstly, the filter that removed grain from the film also removed grain from the road, the sand, and Mel Gibson's stubble, all of which there's a lot of in the Road Warrior. Everything looked quite a bit too clean.
But the super high frame rate gave the video a hyper-realistic quality. Not realistic in the sense that I'm watching actual post-apocalyptic survivors. Realistic in the sense that I'm looking at what are clearly actors wearing costumes, and it's hard not to imagine the camera and rigging crew standing just out of frame.
An interesting exercise, but not how I want to experience that movie. Having said that, this was my experience just playing around with ffmpeg on my desktop PC. I wouldn't rule out the possibility that a dedicated professional using the right tools (presumably also ffmpeg) could manage a set of adjustments and upscaling processes that really do create a better experience than the original film.
>everything looks cheaper
Specifically to You because you grew up with soap operas. Young people today grew up with 60 fps games and video, to them 24-30 fps looks broken.
It also has to do with how basically everything is filmed for Netflix/streaming nowadays.
Not really sure I get why that would be a factor
Thing is, to some population this is seen as better. While to me it feels as journalists camera, too real to pass as a story.
I hope you waited until they were out of the room and turned it off in settings?
This phenomenon of pushing technology that end consumers don't want, seem to be driven by a simple sequence of incentives: pressure from shareholders to maintain/increase stock price -> pressure on business to increase market share, raise prices, or at least showcase promising future tech -> pressure on PMs to build new features -> combined with developers' desire to try out new technologies -> result: AI chatbots/summaries on things we didn't ask for, touchscreens on car dashboards, AI upscaling etc.
After decades of consumerism, most consumers already have most of what they need/want, so in order to keep selling widgets, corporations must manufacture demand. Enough big screen TVs have already been built and sold to give every American a fully functional 60"+ screen in every room in their residence, enough lightly used ones to go around to completely negate the need to manufacture more. But profit must not go down for any reason, so they must invent gimmicks to push the latest and greatest model onto a public that can't even tell the difference without marketing propaganda.
The entire global economic system depends on the unceasing transformation of natural resources into a stream of disposable crap for the benefit of the ownership class and shareholding leeches. It's obviously unsustainable, but so are the mortal lives of those who benefit from the system. What incentive have they to save a world in which they will no longer have any stake? Better to live out their days in comfort and wealth by cutting down the saplings under whose shade they will never sit.
I say enough is enough.
> pushing technology that end consumers don't want
Flashback to when every TV at CES had 3D functionality. Turns out nobody really wanted what. What an immense waste of resources that was.
Failure of 3D TVs was one unprecedented glorious victory of a customer, where customers not buying it indeed led to its disappearance. Otherwise I'm furiously not buying other ridiculous stuff but my consumer decision does nothing.
I still have one! But there is, of course, pretty much no 3d content to view on it. Maybe Gran Turismo on ps3
When stock price has to grow 8% more than gdp this is inevitable.
> Who seriously thinks this looks better
I don’t think people notice. I don’t own a TV, but twice now I’ve been to some friend’s house and I immediately noticed it on theirs. Both times I explained the Soap Opera effect and suggested disabling the feature. They both agreed, let me do it, and haven’t turned it on again. But I also think that is a mix of trusting me and not caring, I’m not convinced they could really tell the difference.
Tip for those aiming to do the same: Search online for “<tv brand> soap opera effect” and you’re bound to find a website telling you the whereabouts of how to reach the setting. It may not be 100% correct, so be on the lookout for whatever dumb name the manufacturer gave the “feature” (usually described in the same guide you would have found online).
> I got a serious uneasy feeling as if I was on a psychedelic and couldn't quite trust my perception, especially at the 2:00 mark
You weren’t kidding. That bit at 02:06 really makes you start to blink and look closer. The face morphs entirely.
https://youtu.be/7Yyx31HPgfs&t=126s
Looking at the original, it’s obvious why: that section was really blurry. The AI version doesn’t understand camera effects.
https://youtu.be/1X6KF1IkkIc?t=126
Thank you for providing both links, it made the comparison really simple.
If you watch the average person watch TV, they don’t actually pay attention to it. Everyone is just on their phone. It drives me crazy watching just about anything with people because I look around and no one even has their eyes on the TV. It’s just background noise.
The AI upscaling makes it look like NIN are playing with late-1980s era Rick Astley. Hilarious.
Rick Astley is so ubiquitous now, thanks to Memes, the AI is never gonna give him up.
We know the rules, and so do AI
* slow clap *
That is terrible.
I see this upscaling a lot in Youtube videos about WWII that use very grainy B+W film sources (which themselves aren't using the best sources of) and it just turns the footage into some weird flat paneled cartoonish mess. It's not video anymore, it's an animated approximation.
Yes, 2:07 is just ridiculous. That's more Matt Damon than David Bowie. To be fair, though, this upscale was not committed by Youtube.
https://youtu.be/7Yyx31HPgfs?list=RD7Yyx31HPgfs&t=127
The most upvoted comment is "Thank you so much for preserving this!!"
The closeups of the bass player are like 6 slowmotion frames in the original and look like an interpolated mess with unhuman body joints upscaled.
What makes it uneasy is not only upscaling but they are generating new frames to make it 60fps. 60fps by itself feels fake (check some footage of The Hobbit that tried 48fps). It feels like video games.
It's kinda funny to aim for 60fps because modern video productions will often have 60fps footage that's too sharp and clean. So they heavily post process the videos. You add the film grain and lower the fps to 30 or even 24 (cinema) so it looks much more natural.
The question is if this is just habitual / taste thing. We most likely wouldn't prefer 24fps if the movie industry started with 50fps.
I actually went out of my way to watch The Hobbit at theaters with the 48fps copy because I thought it was incredible despite the wrerched 3D it was paired with. 24fps has always seemed choppy and confusing to me with any kind of action, and The Hobbit was a breath of fresh air
I consider it a genuine shame there's no way to release the 48fps cut on home media.
It is just habitual and I feel it's making movies look terrible, especially panning shots look like a stuttery mess that is almost unwatchable for me at 24 FPS.
> Who seriously thinks this looks better, even if the original is a slightly grainy recording from the 90's?
Whatever you had as a kid feels "natural", these things feel "natural" for new generations.
Same things for a proper file system vs "apps", a teenagers on an ipad will do things you didn't know were possible, put them on windows XP and they won't be able to create a file or a folder, they don't even know what these words mean in the context of computers.
This sounds like two completely different things. I know people from my parent's generation who would say that the scenes on new TV's look "weird" until the motion smoothing is switched off. This is neurological, not generational.
> I know people from my parent's generation who would say that the scenes on new TV's look "weird" until the motion smoothing is switched off
That's my point, older people feel the weirdness, kids have been growing with smoothed videos and can't tell it's weird
In that case the answer is even simpler: what few young people I know (yes, N = small) have been the loudest in complaining about the feature. They seem to prefer "cinema quality" the same way some people of my generation like vinyl records.
The first video induced actual physical nausea.
I had to stop playback or I’m sure I would have thrown up. And I don’t suffer from motion sickness etc.
There’s definitely something “uncanny valley” about it.
Holy... wtf...
At 2:04 the original deliberately has everyone on stage way out of focus, and the AI upscaler (or the person operating it) decided to just replace it with an in-focus version sporting what looks like late 90s video game characters. That is terrible.
Also, David Bowie looks like a 20-something-year old man in this shot.
I also think it looks like garbage, but I wonder if maybe it looks better on small mobile screens - where you can't actually see the mangled details, but can perceive that it "looks sharper"
> I got a serious uneasy feeling as if I was on a psychedelic and couldn't quite trust my perception
When I took LSD for the first time, I realised it was hitting when everything started looking like stable diffusion
I pulled up a podcast on YouTube the other week of just two people facing the camera and their faces side-by-side the screen. I had to just use audio only. I couldn't actually look at the video. The guest on the show was using some kind of AI filter for his video stream. I guess because he was on a low-quality phone camera, and he thought the filter would be better?? But the result was very disturbing. I almost barfed on my desk when his image came up.
Wow, you're not kidding. In some shots David Bowie barely looks like David Bowie because the algorithm's taken such liberties with the original image to try and make it look sharp.
Your post just made me realise that as soon as the technology is ready, built-in AI upscaling will be just as ubiquitous as motion smoothing.
Not sure if you're serious, but wouldn't it be more efficient to upscale at source and stream the result? Extra bandwidth versus a million TVs all doing the same computation.
Yeah but that wouldn't let them slap AI on the TV box as a selling point
Wow, that is horrible! The 2:07 mark where AI put in some generic Rick Astley-alike for Bowie, just made me feel sick
I think its preferred to get this kind of smooth unreal effect for services like youtube, but not because it looks better; but rather because it compresses better for storage. Less fine detail overall helps video compression.
I like upscaling and frame interpolation but as always, the TV does not have the hardware to do a good job. If you use neural network models, it works and looks a lot better without looking plastic-like.
I think the only way to future-proof 24 fps content is to render it as 120fps, but repeat every frame 5 times. 5 * 24 = 120fps.
I don't think TVs can frame smooth that. It should display as intended.
It was probably a Technology Connections video or something but I learned that film projectors actually flash each frame 3 times before progressing to the next so the light is flickering 72 times a second, while the image is only changing 24 fps.
You will see the same thing on any online real estate listing. I spend more time wondering why it looks so weird than I do looking at what the picture is attempting to show.
This reminds me of colorized black and white movies from the 90s although I can know imagine AI being used to do that and upscale the past creating new hyper-real versions of the past.
It’s surprising how many people don’t notice when frame smoothing is on, when it looks so bad.
Two root comments (so far) are focusing on YouTube, but the article claims most of the AI was done by Will’s team, using AI to convert stills to video:
> The video features real performances and real audiences, but I believe they were manipulated on two levels:
1. Will Smith’s team generated several short AI image-to-video clips from professionally-shot audience photos
2. YouTube post-processed the resulting Shorts montage, making everything look so much worse
You can see the side-by-side [1] of the YouTube post-processing, and, while definitely altering the original, isn’t what’s causing most of the really bad AI artifacts.
Most of what YouTube appears to be doing is making it less blurry, sometimes successfully, and sometimes not. And, even with that, it is only done on Shorts.
[1] https://youtu.be/Bx5GzIsmEBI
I don't see any differences in that video
Yeah, it’s definitely subtle, for the most part. But if you pause it and move it around frames, you can definitely see where post processing attempted to sharpen some of the out-of-focus parts.
But, again, the AI artifacts are from taking still shots and using AI to generate videos, which was done separately/intentionally by Will’s team (according to the article).
I wonder if there are two people reading this and wishing that Coldplay had employed this technology earlier this summer?
On a serious note, I find this trend of shoving AI everywhere pretty disturbing. For instance, I used to enjoy Spotify’s “Discover Weekly” feature to find new music, but these days it’s offering so many AI generated songs the experience is pretty jarring.
I've been really tempted to drop out of Spotify and start buying CDs from my local music shop instead. Then I can get a USB CD reader and start building my own little music collection. In the pursuit of keeping "up to date" and having access to "everything" we've totally lost touch with the human element of sharing music.
Spotify is an unbelievably shitty company, literally any other music service is better for everyone involved.
Yeah, I can see how that would feel jarring. Music discovery is supposed to feel like serendipity—stumbling across a track you didn’t know you needed—so when AI-generated filler creeps into that space, it can cheapen the experience.
Spotify hasn’t officially said they’re flooding “Discover Weekly” with AI songs, but there’s definitely been a surge of AI-produced music uploaded to streaming platforms in the past year. Since Spotify’s algorithms don’t always distinguish between human and synthetic content, it can end up mixing both in your recommendations. That’s especially noticeable in genres where production is relatively easy for AI to mimic (ambient, lo-fi, EDM, generic pop).
I think the larger unease you’re feeling—AI creeping into places where you expected human curation or artistry—is being shared by a lot of listeners. There’s a debate brewing about whether platforms should label AI music clearly, or even let users opt out of algorithmic recommendations that include it.
Do you want me to check what tools or tricks people are using to filter out AI-generated songs on Spotify (or elsewhere), so you can get back to the human-made discovery experience?
(Sorry, I couldn't help myself with this one. I'll see myself out now.)
Yes, you are being sarcastic and making fun, but I want it.
If I were a marketing person I would also make genuine images look AI generated for the free publicity. Nothing gets attention like mistakes or fakes. The fact that they aren't actually fake means there is no downside for WS and team. I once spoke to a social media manager for a large brand and he said they intentionally put typos in posts on a semi regular basis and it always results in more post engagement (people correcting the typo).
It's called ragebait and it's pretty common in marketing already.
“There’s no such thing as bad PR.”
Like the new Naked Gun movie adding extra floating fingers to their poster, heh.
Am I the only person here that thinks the bigger issue here is consent?
These people reasonably consented to being in photos and videos, as we all do going to gigs.
But they almost certainly did not give informed consent to have the artist's team fake video of them using AI?
Is that even legal in the countries it was done in?
I’m sure they “consented” by the fine print on the ticket checkout screen and some form of signs at the venue saying “by entering you consent to be filmed etc etc etc”
Not that I think that’s valid morally but they are probably covered from a legal angle.
Please excuse any perceived tone in my reply. I'm furious but not at you, and I've re-drafted this several times and I can't even tell what tone it conveys any more. I appreciate your thoughtful response and you're likely right in that they've likely ticket a box or walked past a sign or whatever, as we always used to for photos and video. And you've explicitly noted you're not commenting on the morality of it.
I'm certainly not saying you're wrong. Although you might be, if the specific country has laws around deepfakes that don't explicitly specify they need to be sexually explicit to be illegal.
Or if you're not allowed to bury ridiculous stuff in small print.
I've just checked the terms and conditions of entry for the next venue I'm going to, and you're right that buried in the T&Cs of entry is:
>By entering the Venue you agree to your actual or simulated likeness being included for no fee within any film, photograph, audio and/or audio-visual recording to be exploited in any and all media for any purpose at any time throughout the world. This includes filming by the police or security staff which may be carried out for the security of customers or the prevention of crime. However, you may object to such use by specific request to privacy@livenation.co.uk .
The signage for the above venue did not make this clear last time I was there. I wonder if that was the case for the venues involved?
But there's no way people walking in the venue can reasonably be expected to have given informed consent to the artist producing deepfakes of them.
Oof, “simulated likeness” is doing a lot of work here. I agree with you 100%
Some PM in Youtube: “ yes let’s make it harder to tell real videos from AI to make people who don’t know better more susceptible and accepting of it”
I don't even think there is this much thought involved.
There's two things happening. There are true believers who think that AI is legitimately magic and should be put into every product and then there are people who are putting AI into every product because their director or VP thinks that AI is legitimately magic and is insisting that they put it in every product. Brainstorming sessions aren't "how can we solve problem X for users" but are instead "where can AI change our product."
Never attribute malice where bad incentives suffice.
Someone's KPI was to sprinkle AI. And someone got it by shoehorning "AI enhancement" in place of the previous sharpen + Denoise filter at YouTube.
Except: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/14328491?hl=en&co=...
> Some PM in Youtube: “ yes let’s make it harder to tell real videos from AI to make people who don’t know better more susceptible and accepting of it”
This can backfire, perhaps making people believe that real, important news is in reality AI-generated to brainwash them, thus making people less susceptible, and more disbelieving.
I have no doubt that will happen. And bad actors will definitely try to use “it was AI” to discredit real things they’ve done. Musk as already tried to pull that stunt.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/apr/27/elon-musk...
The whole point is to make people believe in nothing. When all news is fake, no news matter.
> The whole point is to make people believe in nothing. When all news is fake, no news matter.
This does not change my point that this is a dangerous game to play: if people believe in nothing, they will also not believe in what "those in power" or the government wants them to believe. People who have no trust in such entities have a lower "emotional barrier" to overcome to turn against such entities.
It’s why you establish a cult first.
Thats the future. Kids arnt going to have the same mental history as older generayions.
My hardware/software or my eyes are borked because I cannot tell much of a difference between YouTube vs Instagram side-by-side. Gosh. If it is not my eyes, what are the recommendations? What is the top 1 (or 5) reasons I cannot see it if it is not my eyes? Do I need to upgrade my monitor? I have a relatively recent GPU but it is not a beast and I use a HDMI -> VGA converter.
The pictures, however, look god-awful! I presume the video is filled with stuff like these.
The videos are more subtle and it's not apparent in every frame. Look for things in the background snapping into and out of focus, weird textures appearing on Will's head and neck, and people's faces looking unnaturally sharp at the edges, while their skin is uncannily smooth (sort of like Max Headroom.)
The "upscaling" significantly changes the content of the picture, altering half of the faces, their expressions, whether eyes are closed, mouths open, etc, on top of making it actually HARDER to see details. The "upscaling" on android smartphone cameras has always been similarly trash. There is always some odd fractal-looking noise filter added. Who is actually asking for this stuff?
Theres not a single person i know in my life who will want this as a consumer. WHY does the world keep doing things that are so complicated and unnecessary.
Sometimes countries get involved in military conflicts so that they can test their hardware and learn important lessons for the next big war. They are building the leadership, logistics and institutional knowledge for when it's really needed.
Perhaps it's Google warming up their teams for when they have a proper use of their technology and know-how.
Before AI was a thing, that same sentiment was true for almost every startup, especially the ones that had "get" in their domain name. Yet here we are.
Because necessary things are equally complicated but less profitable.
On this episode of "Trying to make AI useful"...
Seriously, who's idea was this? It can't be a money saving feature; surely it costs more to upscale all these videos than to just host the HD version.
And even if you argue it can be used only on low res videos to provide a "better experience", the resulting distortion of reality should be very concerning.
Google does not deal in reality. They are selling ads and want engagement.
Open an company that sells t-shirts with "AI glitched" text on it so people can make every foto of this kind illegitimate.
In a couple of years, they can go into same junk drawer of sixth finger prosthetics (generative AI problem) and 5-eyes masks (face recognition problem).
Oh those already exist, they just print out whatever ChatGPT gives them without double-checking.
https://www.theverge.com/youtube/765485/is-youtubes-shorts-e...
Today on The Verge, GenAI upscaling in YT shorts. Yes, AI is here to stay, but I do hope the icky parts go away soon.
> GenAI upscaling in YT shorts
I cannot watch the linked video, but its description quotes “not generative AI”; is The Verge or someone else showing something different?
This is being unnecessarily pedantic. They're saying "yes we're doing post-processing, but that's not technically generative AI."
Personally I couldn't care less about what they call it, I care that it makes the same video look more artifical on YouTube than they look elsewhere.
> Hi! I'm a tech nerd and I try to be precise about the terminology I use
> GenAI typically refers to technologies like transformers and large language models, which are relatively new
> Upscaling typically refers to taking one resolution (like SD/480p) and making it look good at a higher resolution (like HD/1080p)
> This isn't using GenAI or doing any upscaling
> It's using the kind of machine learning you experience with computational photography on smartphones, for example, and it's not changing the resolution
> And sincerely appreciate the feedback!
I agree with The Verge here in that it is probably using a diffusion model somewhere, and that it is splitting hairs to say that it is not generative AI. The artifacts are very "diffusion".
There's no strict definition of these things, the quote is from YT and they're saying something like this isn't that _bad_ generative AI that people are worried about, this is just good old fashioned wholesome machine learning techniques.
I fear the icky parts might be the only ones staying.
[dead]
I wonder if the fact that the original video was AI generated made the upscaling look worse than it would on a real video? Not that it can certainly be detected, but an actual video is likely different from an AI generated in ways that it seems like could lead astray their "computational photography" processing.
Everthing is a copy of a copy of a copy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pAQ3JuXkDkU
Soon you won't be able to tell the difference between AI generated and 'real' content, since the 'real' content will be all processed by AI automatically. Quality in -> Garbage out.
Non-AI mucked content will be considered "artisanal" and "high end" instead of the base line.
Already happening. Take a photo on your phone of something at a distance at maximum zoom. The amount of digital processing going on is crazy. People didn't want blurriness so instead these highly zoomed photos now look like impressionist paintings.
The most incredible part about this story is that Will Smith is still a performing (and touring???) musician with any audience at all, AI or otherwise. I thought he was an actor now. Wut happened?
Will Smith has been both a successful musician and actor since the Fresh Prince days. People do both. I don't know why this would be confusing to you.
I think it was confusing to me as well because this guy is some sort of 90's legend, and I do not understand what kind of relevance he might still have, especially on anybody under 35. It's not like he successfully transition into some kind of cultural-relevant behemoth such as Ozzy Osborne or Snoop Dogg, he kind of plateau'd at least a decade ago, but potentially more...
I used to watch and enjoy the Fresh Prince, but you couldn't offer me enough money to go to Will Smith concert, because, why the hell would I do that...
People over 35 are the people with money. I can't imagine a bunch of 16 year olds paying £300 to go and see Oasis in the 90s, but those 16 year olds are now in their 40s and now have money and an opportunity to live their adolescent dream.
he did plateau, but he did achieve superstar status. people who achieve less still do “retirement” tours (to pay the bills) and book large crowds decades later.
Whenever one gets cancelled, it opens up new opportunities for them.
Nothing new about it, Will Smith has been pulling crowds like this for decades.
He is one of the most famous people in the world and had multiple #1 records.
I'm not sure about this specific instance, but AI generated movies will absolutely be the future, when you can create the exact shots you want with stability of the foreground, background, and characters, and edit it all together, it'll be an explosion of creativity just as with image generation currently.
To be clear, I don't think it'll be telling an AI to "create me a movie with X, Y, and Z" because AI reasoning is not there yet, but for the raw video generation, it's progressing steadily, as seen in r/aivideo.
I don't exactly disagree, but I do suggest reading "Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art" by Lewis Hyde.
There is a reasonable argument to be made that a lot of art is enlivened by the cantankerous, unpredictable and unyielding nature of the media we use to create art. I don't think this is a necessary feature of art per se, but I do think limitations often help humans create good art and that eliminating them often produces things which feel tossed off, trivial, thoughtless.
I think for commercial produces creating "the exact shot you want" might be what shareholders demand of you. But many artists don't set out to create "the exact shot they want," they set out to collaborate with the world to create an impression that captures both their intent and the unpredictable substance of the situation in whatever sense that might mean.
> […] it'll be an explosion of creativity just as with image generation currently.
I'm mostly seeing people who lack the skills or means to create their own works go nuts with prompting gen-AI tools, but it rarely strikes me as creative in either the 'having the ability to create' sense — they've outsourced that — or the 'original, expressive, imaginative' sense.
They don't have the mechanical means, yes, but they decide what to create so it'd be the latter, not sure why you think it's not; the AI isn't independently coming up with ideas and generating the media. Plus with ComfyUI, I'd say there's some of the former too, similar to how music producers aren't literally playing each instrument that's simulated in their software, but they do assemble it together.
Creativity is more than just deciding that you want 'a space opera, but with an order of knights who yield swords that glow, bad guy looks like a Japanese samurai, reimagined in a 1970s futuristic style.'
Creativity is not just having the idea, it's bearing that to fruition in you own manner (or that of a group of people). Gen-AI outsources the 'creativity' needed to get what it generates. The prompt wrangler provides only the prompt; the rest is drawn from the training data.
Are collages creative? What and is ones "own manner?" Does it require using one's bare hands, or do computers count? Does Photoshop count? There is nothing fundamentally different, 20 years ago people were harping over the Adobe suite too.
The way people are using gen AI is way more creative than typing in a prompt, and it is no different than electronic music producers, it's an arrangement of discrete elements they do not necessarily produce themselves.
Maybe AI can make all the low budget copy cat movies that blockbusters generate.
https://www.ign.com/articles/star-wars-rip-offs
The line between movie and games will blur. Once you can do generative movies, you can do games, and vice versa, there's no obvious delineation, and the technical problem is heavily overlapping. Games just has some scoped control inputs, like this: https://demo.dynamicslab.ai/chaos
There are world models such as Genie [0] which show that they can be constrained to games too.
[0] https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/genie-3-a-new-frontier...
> Once you can do generative movies, you can do games
No you can't, these are completely different mediums.
https://www.pcgamer.com/software/ai/microsofts-100-percent-a...
?
If by "game" you mean running around aimlessly in a generic fantasy world, and by "movie" you mean animated pictures, then sure. But that's not my definition of either of these things.
At a sufficient level of scale, that is what they are though. Movie literally means moving pictures.
> it'll be an explosion of creativity just as with image generation currently.
I haven't seen anything breathtaking yet, just a tsunami of slop. Arguably we already had a video tsunami of slop, you just have log in into netflix to witness it.
For a long time I disliked the term "content" to describe photos/movies/art/&c. but now I feel it's a very appropriate term, an infinite amount of meaningless "content" to fill bottomless "containers"
Yes it'll still take time, and you will see more slop but there will always be a few gems in the slip that rise up.
Regarding "content," you might be interested in https://youtu.be/LRKeFRaYF-E
Nope. Limitations feed creativity. When you have unlimited power/reesources, you end up with unlimited slop. One of the reasons why old movies were better on average - now we get so many average movies with no lasting effect. Another one, slightly orthogonal - a golden ring or rolex in a neatly designed photo shoot vs a middle eastern head of state's "throne room". When you have something in limited quantities, you get the best out of it - when it's unlimited you go crazy.
Survivorship bias, there is no indication that older movies were better on average. While I can agree that constraints breed creativity as they say, the opposite can also be true; look at software, one can also theoretically code an unlimited number of things, and from that we get people creating software and connecting devices to a never before seen level of scale and creativity.
Agreed that technology opens up possibilities. If we continue on the movie analogy, moving from practical effects to CGI opened up possibilities - however it still had limitations (realism, uncanny valley, cost, render time etc.) - which pushed people to be strike a balance. However AI generated stuff gives you unlimited possibilities - whatever you imagine, becomes the scene. I recently saw a AI-augmented tourism video of a major tourist destination - it was vomit inducing. Of course, one may argue that it's just lack of art direction - same effect could be had with more traditional methods, but I still believe cost / possibilities constraints pushed people in the right direction. Maybe it's the luddite in me talking.
As always, there are some people with taste and most without. Just because the tools change does not mean one suddenly develops taste and creativity.
For example, I saw this the other day. Could it be better, sure, but it's at least interesting in itself.
https://www.reddit.com/r/aivideo/s/6EHgC29fvM
I think the biggest takeaway for people in the industry is that the reaction to perceived AI videography is overwhelmingly negative. Using AI to generate footage of real people immediately makes watchers suspect something needs to be covered up or counterfeited. People know what reality looks like, and sloppily subverting it will never be popular.
So... the videos showing the difference between the AI-tainted youtube version and the supposedly untainted instagram version are hosted on... youtube?
apparently the sharpening algorithm is only applied on youtube shorts, not on regular youtube videos.
the experimental post processing was only applied to shorts, according to the post.
> "Conclusion - Virtually all of the commenters on YouTube, Reddit, and X" SNIP
That's fine and commenters on those sites are entitled to their opinions, but it's strange they didn't mention Hacker News.
Be glad. The less mainstream HN stays, the better.
What's the point of using videos like this if it's a risk to reputation just to use them?
The people with whom this is a reputational risk were not going to buy Will Smith concert tickets anyway.
There's no risk to reputation. You get a massive rage boost then reveal that "a social media contractor used authentic crowd photographs in an unauthorized manner and is no longer employed by the company". You reveal the photos, everyone either celebrates the contractor getting canned or that this wasn't AI and you get huge lift.
People are suckers. You can tell them you are going to do this, do it, and they'll still fall for it. Don't tell them and they'll think better of themselves and of you for obeying them (cf fictional firing) and you're done!
The same reason you don't feed prime vegetables and fruits to pigs.
there are no risk of reputation until you use it. further more, even within creative professions, using Gen AI is already acceptable to some degree.
The entire point of this article is that the "make it look worse" filter is being applied by YouTube automatically, whether creators want it or not.
Saving money of course! That’s the sad truth
What's the point of saving money if it's a risk to reputation?
Will smith punched a dude on stage, a comedian. I think you are putting a lot on a cage concept with a scatter plot of outliers.
You actually need a reputation of merit for there to be risk. Hes a rapper, not a saint or Ethicist.
“AI” editing is one thing
The upscaling seems to be Google doing it without permission of the original uploader. Google however are unaccountable, you can’t complain otherwise you’ll be exiled
Vote with wallet etc /s
I wonder if it had the same bad effect on other content (surely they tested it first and thought it would be useful!). Maybe double AI reinforces itself somehow?
I’m wondering at what point the minority are going to finally accept ai is here to stay.
What happens when AI gets trained on AI slop?
If there's code to stop AI from being trained on AI, I would like to have it from stopping me from seeing it.
Google have the untainted video, so it's a competitive advantage
Better question is what happens when a generation knows nothing but slop
From a PR perspective, I wonder why YouTube is at the same time forcing unwanted AI features down people's throats[1], a move that many companies now do to drum up their perceived AI competence, but THEN at the same time, when asked, also downplaying this use of AI by splitting words.
The combination of the two confuses me. If this was about shareholders, they'd hype up the use of AI, not downplay it. And if this was about users, they'd simply disable this shit.
[1] I mean, they're sacrificing Google Search of all things to push their AI crap. Also, as a bilingual YouTube user, AI-translated titles and descriptions make the site almost unusable now. In addition to some moronic PM forcing this feature onto users, they somehow also seem to have implemented the worst translation model in the industry. The results are often utterly incomprehensible, and there's no way to turn this off.
The customers are advertisers and marketers. The product is access to the userbase. This is how we arrive where we are at today, where major clients have made significant investments into AI and expect further return on that investment through proliferation of the technology, while the users could not care less or even balk at it. But we are also at a time where there is no viable alternative to the monopolied corners of the internet such as youtube any longer, so the userbase has nowhere to flee if they even wanted to.
I hate how everyone thinks we have to use AI now. I wish this trend would end already.
Who is this "everyone" who thinks we "have to" use AI? From my experience it's very split with people on both sides.
>Who is this "everyone" who thinks we "have to" use AI?
Upper management. Seriously. The push to use AI in everything is very real.
Yeah but that's not everyone, is what I mean. Upper management is even a minority among everybody.
A minority that has the control over what the majority experiences.
I find it hilarious that the Youtube spokespersons go out of their way to clarify that this is "not the bad GenAI shit that we know everyone hates but the good kind, you know, machine learning and stuff, you know, trust us"
The Youtube liason statement is truly something to behold. It's not "upscaling" it's "unblurring". There's no genai, just "traditional machine learning". Oh, phew! I wouldn't want to have misidentified post-processing as unblurring when it was really upscaling.
I think we may see more of this which, to be blunt, I would say are stupid equivocations that are orthogonal to the actual concern, namely that it violates a fundamental trust that images represent something that really happened. We saw this already with Samsung's headspinning justification of their post-processing a fake moon.
Strap in for more JV debate team level "gosh what is reality anyway" equivocations, which I suspect will become increasingly prevalent.
From now on, I am going to bring an unreadable AI looking sign to every concert I go.
They're not blurring the lines, they're lying. They're generating video that didn't happen and passing it off as real video of events that actually happened. That's lying. Lying a little bit is lying.
This is due to “upscaling”, I remember before the while AI bubble craziness there was a software I used that would upscale images pretty well, except if it has little details like that it would be turned into the mushy stuff you see in the article.
at the end of the day it doesn’t really matter for music performances though as long as we all have ears
his music is terrible
music so bad people are focused on the bad upscaling lol
Is this a dodge or a burn? lol puns likely way over everyones head.
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TLDR: The video got VAEed, and we are the discriminators being fooled.
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I thought Willy had disappeared into the shadows after his wife embarrassed him to the point he prob won’t step foot in public again…
doesn't seem very blurry - don't generate video of a crowd? seems like an easy rule?