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

(waxy.org)
363 points jay_kyburz | 19 comments | 26 Aug 25 04:11 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source | bottom
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ulrikrasmussen ◴[26 Aug 25 06:15 UTC] No.45022875[source]▶
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.

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prmoustache ◴[26 Aug 25 08:04 UTC] No.45023627[source]▶
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.

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gyomu ◴[26 Aug 25 09:14 UTC] No.45024149[source]▶
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.

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1. petralithic ◴[26 Aug 25 09:21 UTC] No.45024178[source]▶
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.
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2. roomey ◴[26 Aug 25 09:38 UTC] No.45024289[source]▶
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

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3. csomar ◴[26 Aug 25 09:46 UTC] No.45024342[source]▶
> 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.

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4. petralithic ◴[26 Aug 25 10:02 UTC] No.45024458[source]▶
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.
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5. petralithic ◴[26 Aug 25 10:05 UTC] No.45024486[source]▶
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.
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6. exitb ◴[26 Aug 25 10:08 UTC] No.45024502[source]▶
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.
7. yorwba ◴[26 Aug 25 10:12 UTC] No.45024526{3}[source]▶
It totally makes sense that people don't request things they don't expect to be possible.
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8. latexr ◴[26 Aug 25 10:33 UTC] No.45024687{3}[source]▶
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.
9. roelschroeven ◴[26 Aug 25 10:45 UTC] No.45024774[source]▶
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.
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10. spwa4 ◴[26 Aug 25 11:04 UTC] No.45024920[source]▶
In other words: this is a complaint about how cheap modified pictures, that look real at first glance, are.
11. petralithic ◴[26 Aug 25 12:11 UTC] No.45025446{4}[source]▶
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.
12. mingus88 ◴[26 Aug 25 12:26 UTC] No.45025590{3}[source]▶
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

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13. conductr ◴[26 Aug 25 13:11 UTC] No.45026057[source]▶
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.
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14. prmoustache ◴[26 Aug 25 13:41 UTC] No.45026435{3}[source]▶
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.
15. JohnFen ◴[26 Aug 25 14:09 UTC] No.45026823{3}[source]▶
> 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.

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16. Atheros ◴[26 Aug 25 14:16 UTC] No.45026897[source]▶
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.
17. conductr ◴[26 Aug 25 14:46 UTC] No.45027306{4}[source]▶
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

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18. JohnFen ◴[27 Aug 25 02:13 UTC] No.45034723{5}[source]▶
> 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.

19. petralithic ◴[27 Aug 25 07:33 UTC] No.45036537{4}[source]▶
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.