I saw this on BlueSky.

[gloriouscow@oldbytes.space]

I saw this on BlueSky.

I don't want to call anybody out, and it's not really important that one person did this as this is going to be a be a general problem going forward.

The increasing popularity of "editing" features in generative AIs is going to lead to a lot of people thinking it is harmless to use it to upscale or contrast-adjust historical media.

#retrocomputing

[gloriouscow@oldbytes.space]

The original comic is on the left. The AI "upscale" is on the right.

At a casual glance it looks like the same thing. Then you notice the faces. And the changes in geometry, fonts, and other details.

[gloriouscow@oldbytes.space]

This is now a false artifact. Expect the internet to become crawling with them. Everything you can think of that some well-meaning person might want to "clean up" before posting, be it comics, news clippings, album art, what have you, is now subject to being replaced with a very similar but entirely different version.

[gloriouscow@oldbytes.space]

We risk losing our collective visual history. It's bad enough that you can't trust any new image made today, now we're also entering an era where we can't trust anything from the past, either, unless we pull it directly from an archival source before 2025.

Ain't that grand.

[nosword@localization.cafe]

@gloriouscow I’m not going to name names but I have heard film scholars argue that it’s okay to use AI-upscaled stills in books because it only shows the original, but in better detail. It was a big moment in my radicalization because it brought home that not even professional thinkers whose entire careers involve images, artifice, suggestion, subtext, are necessarily willing or able to think critically about the things being marketed to them.