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.

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.

Yes, this is the exact same reason that frame smoothing exists. When you walk into a store, all the TVs are lined up showing some random nature show or sports event, and frame smoothing will make your TV look a little more smooth than the others, even though it completely ruins the content.

It's made for making sales, not for making things actually look good.

It doesn't "ruin the content", it's a psychological issue which would be fixed by more high quality productions actually producing high frame-rate content, so the association reverses.

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.