Will Smith's Concert Crowds Are Real, but AI Is Blurring the Lines
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The lines between reality and AI-generated content are blurring, sparking concerns that people will become increasingly susceptible to manipulated media. As one commenter ominously noted, "The whole point is to make people believe in nothing," while others pointed out that this could backfire, leading to widespread skepticism and the discrediting of real events. Some argue that the proliferation of AI-enhanced content is driven more by bad incentives and a desire to "sprinkle AI" into every product rather than a deliberate attempt to deceive. The irony that YouTube, a platform often at the forefront of AI-generated content, is also hosting videos that highlight the differences between AI-tainted and untainted versions has not gone unnoticed.
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This can backfire, perhaps making people believe that real, important news is in reality AI-generated to brainwash them, thus making people less susceptible, and more disbelieving.
This does not change my point that this is a dangerous game to play: if people believe in nothing, they will also not believe in what "those in power" or the government wants them to believe. People who have no trust in such entities have a lower "emotional barrier" to overcome to turn against such entities.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/apr/27/elon-musk...
Someone's KPI was to sprinkle AI. And someone got it by shoehorning "AI enhancement" in place of the previous sharpen + Denoise filter at YouTube.
There's two things happening. There are true believers who think that AI is legitimately magic and should be put into every product and then there are people who are putting AI into every product because their director or VP thinks that AI is legitimately magic and is insisting that they put it in every product. Brainstorming sessions aren't "how can we solve problem X for users" but are instead "where can AI change our product."
You actually need a reputation of merit for there to be risk. Hes a rapper, not a saint or Ethicist.
The upscaling seems to be Google doing it without permission of the original uploader. Google however are unaccountable, you can’t complain otherwise you’ll be exiled
Vote with wallet etc /s
People are suckers. You can tell them you are going to do this, do it, and they'll still fall for it. Don't tell them and they'll think better of themselves and of you for obeying them (cf fictional firing) and you're done!
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.
At 2:04 the original deliberately has everyone on stage way out of focus, and the AI upscaler (or the person operating it) decided to just replace it with an in-focus version sporting what looks like late 90s video game characters. That is terrible.
The extreme blur here was obviously a creative choice by the director/editor, the rest of the video has lower resolution but it's not nearly that bad (which is why Bowie still looks like himself in other parts of the upscaled video).
The process used to upscale the video has no subtlety, it's just "make everything look crisp, even if you have to create entirely made-up faces".
Over time I noticed everything looks cheaper on their TV.
It was the auto-smoothing.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soap_opera_effect
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhGjCzxJV3E
Artists might want to produce a lower framerate just to make something look filmic (eg, 25 frames per second) or hand animated, but it can also be a deliberate stylistic choice for other reasons. Eg, the recentish Mad Max films used subtle undercranking to make action scenes feel more intense, and part of that effect is a more noticeable frames and I think there is a bit of that in the Spiderverse films too.
It was absolutely an artistic choice - Sony spent more per frame on those movies than any previous animated film & the directors knew exactly what they were doing when they chose to animate some parts on every second (or even third) frame.
Because they felt they were being ripped off, with all that unused space. They paid for widescreen!
Didn't matter that people looked all fat in the face, or that the effect was logarithmic near the edges. A car driving by got wider as it neared the edge of screen!
Nope, only mattered it was widescreen now.
And until I mentioned it, they did not even notice.
When I thought of it, I realised this sort of matches everything. Whether food, or especially politics, nuance is entirely lost on the average person.
I feel, as a place for tech startups, we should realise this. If you plan to market to the public, just drop the nuance. You'll save, be more competitive, and win.
Do you really want this to be the world we live in? It's just hurting the people who do care about nuance.
No. But I also don't want to go bankrupt.
If I want to make a niche market product, for the discerning consumer, well that's different. But from what I see, that's not even one in a thousand... so best be careful.
Firstly, the filter that removed grain from the film also removed grain from the road, the sand, and Mel Gibson's stubble, all of which there's a lot of in the Road Warrior. Everything looked quite a bit too clean.
But the super high frame rate gave the video a hyper-realistic quality. Not realistic in the sense that I'm watching actual post-apocalyptic survivors. Realistic in the sense that I'm looking at what are clearly actors wearing costumes, and it's hard not to imagine the camera and rigging crew standing just out of frame.
An interesting exercise, but not how I want to experience that movie. Having said that, this was my experience just playing around with ffmpeg on my desktop PC. I wouldn't rule out the possibility that a dedicated professional using the right tools (presumably also ffmpeg) could manage a set of adjustments and upscaling processes that really do create a better experience than the original film.
Specifically to You because you grew up with soap operas. Young people today grew up with 60 fps games and video, to them 24-30 fps looks broken.
Flashback to when every TV at CES had 3D functionality. Turns out nobody really wanted what. What an immense waste of resources that was.
The entire global economic system depends on the unceasing transformation of natural resources into a stream of disposable crap for the benefit of the ownership class and shareholding leeches. It's obviously unsustainable, but so are the mortal lives of those who benefit from the system. What incentive have they to save a world in which they will no longer have any stake? Better to live out their days in comfort and wealth by cutting down the saplings under whose shade they will never sit.
I say enough is enough.
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.
It's made for making sales, not for making things actually look good.
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.
Film making at 24fps (while originally selected for pragmatic reasons having to do with film cost and sound fidelity) turned out to be a happy accident. It produces an Impressionistic Effect entirely similar to a money painting. 24fps is absolutely not reality. Our brains know it too. The same way they know that those giant brush strokes in a Van Gough painting are also NOT REALITY. Turns out our brains like to be toyed with. Art is just always “trying to document precisely what our senses would have experienced if we were there”.
That is just a false premise and one they misunderstands art in general.
24fps was not a deliberate choice that was made a century after we previously had high frame-rate. It was a limitation at the time.
Impressionism was a deliberate choice, it came centuries after more detailed paintings were being done. And there were indeed many critics of the movement at the time.
24fps in movies is just banking on the comfortable, the familiar. It isn't art, it's giving people what they expect and not challenging people. It has about as much artistic merit as the N'th Mission impossible movie or MCU movie.
Look, detailed photos can be art. Not saying that HFR cannot be art, but we'd all agree that realism and impressionism are simply different forms of art. And often times those who like one, doesn't like the other.
So you have to accept that those are find the appeal of 24fps due to its "different than reality" look, they might easily find HFR material to be "boring and hyper real" in the same way I might look at a crystal clear photo of Paris and think the same, whereas a Monet impression of it, is way more appealing.
But the artifacts introduced by TV frame interpolation absolutely can ruin the content completely.
It's just SOE, soap opera effect, and it has nothing to do with any artifacts from motion smoothing, because the look is the same even if it's filmed in HFR. The only things I like in HFR are sports or maybe home videos. Any sort of movie or TV show where I want the suspension of disbelief, I am still much preferring 24fps.
Of course this is just my opinion, but home theater is a big hobby of mine and so I spend a fairly great deal of time looking at different content and analyzing it and thinking about it and how I feel about it or enjoy it.
Not attempting to take anything away from those who do like HFR, but just saying that it's not for everyone.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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
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.
But I lament these blurred lines of reality. Is this photo real? Was this reply ChatGPT or did they actually write it?
It makes me feel uneasy.
Take for instance instagram, youtube shorts and tiktok. I see people watching tons of small either supposedly funny or shocking videos. And people seem to believe they are totally real and not organize/produced content until I challenge them on a number of trivial details that make those videos totally unbelievable they would have been recorded by chance or in an opportunistic manner.
There's a general belief that nothing is real, but we should still just act, and be influenced by it, as if it were real.
https://www.facebook.com/groups/842315653616542/posts/149825...
Random example I just found in a group called "Photo Restoration Facebook Group"
And the answer is often "GOOD photography is about capturing a fleeting moment in time, forever, so that we can enjoy it longer"
But what is happening now is going the other way - people are using photography to be more imaginative, as a creative medium more akin to composing a painting. Transforming reality rather than merely recording it
“Generate, transform and edit images with simple text prompts, or combine multiple images to create something new. All in Gemini.“
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45026719
2) This seems very similar to me to those weird fuzzy double-exposure, heavily posed portraits that used to be really popular, or in general not that different from going and having family photos taken at a cheap mall photo studio with one of five shitty looking background-tarps.
I suspect there are some interesting class components to that second one (Fussell may even have mentioned it in his book, I can't recall, but it's definitely the kind of thing that probably could have served his analysis) but overall I think the "unwashed masses" have long preferred really shitty, lazily/poorly staged & manipulated photos to authentic ones. Now they can just apply that same aesthetic preference to photos that weren't originally like that.
One funny thing I've noticed is that software developers (including myself) seem to rebel against it the most. A surprising number of software developers I know shoot film. No digital cameras, they just take photos, get the prints, and they're done.
It seems to be the non-technical people who are most OK with the inauthenticity that comes with AI "enhanced" photos.
I think we lost something in that. Embarrassment can be useful for moving us out of our comfort zones.
The number of people who care about having an objectively true understanding of as much of reality as possible is disappointingly small and I suspect that these photo trends are just making that fact more obvious.
It's kinda funny to aim for 60fps because modern video productions will often have 60fps footage that's too sharp and clean. So they heavily post process the videos. You add the film grain and lower the fps to 30 or even 24 (cinema) so it looks much more natural.
The question is if this is just habitual / taste thing. We most likely wouldn't prefer 24fps if the movie industry started with 50fps.
I consider it a genuine shame there's no way to release the 48fps cut on home media.
Whatever you had as a kid feels "natural", these things feel "natural" for new generations.
Same things for a proper file system vs "apps", a teenagers on an ipad will do things you didn't know were possible, put them on windows XP and they won't be able to create a file or a folder, they don't even know what these words mean in the context of computers.
That's my point, older people feel the weirdness, kids have been growing with smoothed videos and can't tell it's weird
I don’t think people notice. I don’t own a TV, but twice now I’ve been to some friend’s house and I immediately noticed it on theirs. Both times I explained the Soap Opera effect and suggested disabling the feature. They both agreed, let me do it, and haven’t turned it on again. But I also think that is a mix of trusting me and not caring, I’m not convinced they could really tell the difference.
Tip for those aiming to do the same: Search online for “<tv brand> soap opera effect” and you’re bound to find a website telling you the whereabouts of how to reach the setting. It may not be 100% correct, so be on the lookout for whatever dumb name the manufacturer gave the “feature” (usually described in the same guide you would have found online).
> 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
You weren’t kidding. That bit at 02:06 really makes you start to blink and look closer. The face morphs entirely.
https://youtu.be/7Yyx31HPgfs&t=126s
Looking at the original, it’s obvious why: that section was really blurry. The AI version doesn’t understand camera effects.
https://youtu.be/1X6KF1IkkIc?t=126
Thank you for providing both links, it made the comparison really simple.
Obviously this is a nightmare scenario for filmmakers, but it also feels like the logical conclusion of where we're heading.
I don't think TVs can frame smooth that. It should display as intended.
When I took LSD for the first time, I realised it was hitting when everything started looking like stable diffusion
https://youtu.be/7Yyx31HPgfs?list=RD7Yyx31HPgfs&t=127
I had to stop playback or I’m sure I would have thrown up. And I don’t suffer from motion sickness etc.
There’s definitely something “uncanny valley” about it.
I see this upscaling a lot in Youtube videos about WWII that use very grainy B+W film sources (which themselves aren't using the best sources of) and it just turns the footage into some weird flat paneled cartoonish mess. It's not video anymore, it's an animated approximation.
> The video features real performances and real audiences, but I believe they were manipulated on two levels:
1. Will Smith’s team generated several short AI image-to-video clips from professionally-shot audience photos
2. YouTube post-processed the resulting Shorts montage, making everything look so much worse
You can see the side-by-side [1] of the YouTube post-processing, and, while definitely altering the original, isn’t what’s causing most of the really bad AI artifacts.
Most of what YouTube appears to be doing is making it less blurry, sometimes successfully, and sometimes not. And, even with that, it is only done on Shorts.
[1] https://youtu.be/Bx5GzIsmEBI
But, again, the AI artifacts are from taking still shots and using AI to generate videos, which was done separately/intentionally by Will’s team (according to the article).
If there's code to stop AI from being trained on AI, I would like to have it from stopping me from seeing it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pAQ3JuXkDkU
Upper management. Seriously. The push to use AI in everything is very real.
Today on The Verge, GenAI upscaling in YT shorts. Yes, AI is here to stay, but I do hope the icky parts go away soon.
I cannot watch the linked video, but its description quotes “not generative AI”; is The Verge or someone else showing something different?
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