Will Smith's concert crowds are real, but AI is blurring the lines

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.

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.

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 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

That's hilarious https://i.imgur.com/TVfncya.png

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.

The AI upscaling makes it look like NIN are playing with late-1980s era Rick Astley. Hilarious.

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.

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.

The most upvoted comment is "Thank you so much for preserving this!!"

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

Thats the future. Kids arnt going to have the same mental history as older generayions.

It's called ragebait and it's pretty common in marketing already.

I fear the icky parts might be the only ones staying.

> 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?

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).

Everthing is a copy of a copy of a copy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pAQ3JuXkDkU

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.

The people with whom this is a reputational risk were not going to buy Will Smith concert tickets anyway.

The same reason you don't feed prime vegetables and fruits to pigs.

Saving money of course! That’s the sad truth

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.

I’m wondering at what point the minority are going to finally accept ai is here to stay.

Google have the untainted video, so it's a competitive advantage

Better question is what happens when a generation knows nothing but slop

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…