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

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 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.

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.