Netflix Is Using AI to Upscale a 1980s Sitcom and the Results Are Borderline Horrific
Netflix Is Using AI to Upscale a 1980s Sitcom and the Results Are Borderline Horrific
If it was shot on film, all you have to do is a new scan, some colour correction and you've got something good. I have a blu ray version of the original Star Trek and it looks fantastic (except for when you see the obvious makeup, of course). But I guess for that you have to hire actually skilled people who want gasp money. Better just feed it to some slop machine for pennies.
But remastering costs money, mkay?
Even AI costs money.
A Different World is known by many as "black Friends" or "Friends before Friends", so maybe Netflix wanted a whiff of the hype that Warner Bros. got when they upscaled Friends to 4K
Could’ve just streamed the DVD version too if they didn’t want to go through that much effort.
Assuming the original film still exists
Self hosting pirated content wins again
Damn right!
Now how long before our web rips are polluted with this nonsense 🤔
They already are but just look into what you’re downloading. It’s been an issue with anime for years already. Even in the post HD era most anime is an odd resolution around like 900p. This led to many careless releases where uploaders either simply downscaled to 720p or upscaled to 1080p without any extra work, which created artifacts, ringing, etc. https://blog.kageru.moe/legacy/resolutions.html for more info
For legacy/pre-hd anime studios overwhelmingly lazily upscaled 480p or 576p dvd releases to 1080p for Blu-ray releases. This resulted in a lot of the problems you see with lazy AI upscales of non animation content: while the overall image appeared sharper there was a loss of finer detail, grain, etc. Some people prefer the sharper image over the more detailed image, some prefer the original with more fidelity. Of course, a proper remaster done with care by hand by an expert would’ve been great and probably balanced these issues but that’s not what they did 99% of the time, they just shit it through a hardware upscaler (as software ones didn’t exist yet). See azumanga daioh, love com, hunter x hunter 1999 version, etc
It sucks because it makes the whole automated stack downloading a bit of a pain
LLMs are much more likely to write bogus content spelled perfectly, this just looks like a typo
If that's the only typo or issue you're able to find it doesnt always mean AI, typos and bad sentence structure have been part of mainstream articles for about a decade now, they probably had something other than a skilled human edit or check for issues but not everything is always AI
Funny thing, AI wouldnt make that mistake...
IT WAS SHOT ON FILM JUST REMASTER IT INSTEAD OF GIVING US "AI" GARBAGE!!
This is maybe one of the bigger issues with AI:
People just blindly trust it
All they had to do is have one guy or gal watch a single episode and they'd know it's shit and they'd have rejected it and have them redo it.
But nooooo, too lazy, AI is awesome and never makes mistakes, right?
It's the same as those university professors adding little hidden AI instructions in essay instructions for students and then students deliver a paper that contains the smurfs song or something because not only were they to lazy to do the work, they were even too lazy to check the AI's work
how is that possible, there's loads of upscaled stuff on youtube that doesn't suffer from such defects
SD content on YouTube is blurry AF. If you use normal upscaling methods you either get a blurry or a blocky mess, computers can't do miracles. There are ways to disguise it a bit. For example, if something was done for CRT TVs you can apply a CRT filter over the upscaled video and the blurriness will even help preserve the original look.
