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”
replies(5):
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 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.
If there's code to stop AI from being trained on AI, I would like to have it from stopping me from seeing it.
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.
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.
You actually need a reputation of merit for there to be risk. Hes a rapper, not a saint or Ethicist.
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.
Over time I noticed everything looks cheaper on their TV.
It was the auto-smoothing.
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 cannot watch the linked video, but its description quotes “not generative AI”; is The Verge or someone else showing something different?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Flashback to when every TV at CES had 3D functionality. Turns out nobody really wanted what. What an immense waste of resources that was.
It's made for making sales, not for making things actually look good.
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.
I think we lost something in that. Embarrassment can be useful for moving us out of our comfort zones.
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.
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.
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!
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
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.
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.
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.
[0] https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/genie-3-a-new-frontier...
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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"
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.
The pictures, however, look god-awful! I presume the video is filled with stuff like these.
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.
That's my point, older people feel the weirdness, kids have been growing with smoothed videos and can't tell it's weird
That's fine and commenters on those sites are entitled to their opinions, but it's strange they didn't mention Hacker News.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/apr/27/elon-musk...
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."
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...
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.
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.)
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.
Do you really want this to be the world we live in? It's just hurting the people who do care about nuance.
I don't think TVs can frame smooth that. It should display as intended.
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.
Regarding "content," you might be interested in https://youtu.be/LRKeFRaYF-E
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.
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
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).
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.
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.
I consider it a genuine shame there's no way to release the 48fps cut on home media.
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.
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.
For example, I saw this the other day. Could it be better, sure, but it's at least interesting in itself.
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.
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.
But the artifacts introduced by TV frame interpolation absolutely can ruin the content completely.
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.
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.
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.
“Generate, transform and edit images with simple text prompts, or combine multiple images to create something new. All in Gemini.“
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.
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?
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
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.
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
Perhaps it's Google warming up their teams for when they have a proper use of their technology and know-how.
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.
Not that I think that’s valid morally but they are probably covered from a legal angle.
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.
https://www.facebook.com/groups/842315653616542/posts/149825...
Random example I just found in a group called "Photo Restoration Facebook Group"
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.
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.
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.
