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.
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.
rightbyte · 41m ago
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.
black_puppydog · 28m ago
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.
kg · 32m ago
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.
SanjayMehta · 22m ago
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.
jader201 · 49m ago
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.
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”
cyanydeez · 3m ago
Thats the future. Kids arnt going to have the same mental history as older generayions.
black_puppydog · 59m ago
So... the videos showing the difference between the AI-tainted youtube version and the supposedly untainted instagram version are hosted on... youtube?
ch_sm · 44m ago
apparently the sharpening algorithm is only applied on youtube shorts, not on regular youtube videos.
superchink · 48m ago
the experimental post processing was only applied to shorts, according to the post.
foota · 27m ago
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.
ojagodzinski · 19m ago
Open an company that sells t-shirts with "AI glitched" text on it so people can make every foto of this kind illegitimate.
cobertos · 54m ago
What's the point of using videos like this if it's a risk to reputation just to use them?
hamdingers · 21m ago
The people with whom this is a reputational risk were not going to buy Will Smith concert tickets anyway.
wordofx · 3m ago
I’m wondering at what point the minority are going to finally accept ai is here to stay.
jacquesm · 35m ago
The same reason you don't feed prime vegetables and fruits to pigs.
jonplackett · 40m ago
Saving money of course! That’s the sad truth
hanspeter · 33m ago
What's the point of saving money if it's a risk to reputation?
14213112 · 34m ago
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.
bananapub · 8m ago
doesn't seem very blurry - don't generate video of a crowd? seems like an easy rule?
hettygreen · 37m ago
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.
Mistletoe · 12m ago
Who the hell are going to Will Smith concerts in Europe? He’s been dead to me since the slap, I cannot imagine going to a concert of his with a clean conscience.
wordofx · 4m ago
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…
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.
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.
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 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.
> 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
If there's code to stop AI from being trained on AI, I would like to have it from stopping me from seeing it.