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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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