Leave Cinema Alone, You A.I. Vandals!

By Petr Navovy | Miscellaneous | May 17, 2024 |

By Petr Navovy | Miscellaneous | May 17, 2024 |

Here’s a phrase that could be applied at any random day of the week with equal force, so let’s go with it today as well: I saw a NY Times article recently that pissed me off.

Now, to be fair to the neolib warhwawks at the Times, in this particular article it wasn’t the actual viewpoint of the article or the paper’s politics or some other atrocity being put across, it was just the topic under discussion.

Namely: AI upscaling of classic films.

Here’s the article if you want to give the NYT some clicks, but briefly speaking it goes into the reactions that people have had—in both directions—to releases of some James Cameron classics like True Lies on Blu-ray coming packaged with versions of the films that have been treated by machine learning processes in order to add detail and resolution and various textures to the visuals of the original.

The company behind these ‘improvements’ is Park Road Post Production, the Peter Jackson-owned outfit that did the impressive work on his Beatles documentary Get Back and the WWI doc They Shall Not Grow Old. Anyone who remembers the ungodly, uncanny valley 48fps motion sheen monstrosity of Jackson’s Hobbit films will know that his work in this area can be a mixed bag to say the least. A lot of ‘AI upscaling’ work will tend towards the horror or the latter.

All I can think of when I see examples like the one pictured above and those listed in the NY Times piece is: Leave cinema alone, you A.I. vandals! That’s obviously not to say there’s no place for loving restoration in cinema, with some amazing work being worldwide on films that would otherwise be lost, and some classic works like The Godfather receiving carefully curated attention (and also some more controversial work), but that’s not what we’re talking about here. The cultural vandals that run Hollywood are in a mad frenzy over the dollar signs multiplying in their eyes as a result of the profit opportunities and artist subjugation opportunities that artificial intelligence grants them. Make no mistake, mass ‘AI upscaling’ of classic cinema is going to gather pace, and it’s going to happen at the behest of money-hungry producers and execs so that they can add more points to the quarterly spreadsheet, rather than out of some deliberately chosen and artistically driven impulse.

As per one of the suits quoted in the NY Times piece:

“People love these movies, which I think is great,” he said. “And they take that love to heart. So when the movie suddenly doesn’t look like they remember it looking, or the way they think they remember it looking, or it just doesn’t look the way they think it should, they get upset. What can you do?”