Adventure Gamers - Forums

AI is amazing isn’t it? The other week I was searching for Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” and I found this fantastic upscaled AI version. Compared with the original I think it’s a great improvement.

Where is the improvement? actually, the AI version is ugly

It reminds me when I was in college sharing a flat with friends. I used to have this poster in my room depicting “The Scream” by Munch, and one of my flatmates kept telling me that “it was painted badly and that he could paint it better”. A always laughed a lot…

Each to their own.

Perhaps you’re both just cave-dwellers who prefer chunky pixels to smooth, beautiful hi-res graphics.

(Where’s rtrooney? He’d back me up on this)

Based on my own experimentations with AI upscaling, I’ve found there are styles it works for and styles it does not. Pixel art is generally a bad fit for upscaling, as the models rarely know what those chunky pixels are meant to represent despite you as a human knows it.

Line art is generally something that works well, so game like Larry 7: Love for Sail would be a relatively good candidate for scaling. Generally speaking, cartoonish art seems to scale better, but if you go towards a more expressive look, then the models are more than likely to not understand (like in that Starry Night example. The AI models just doesn’t understand the expressiveness of Van Gogh, but is trying to find shapes from forms that are meant to express something entirely different)

This really is the reason why the AI upscaled Blade Runner looked so bad. As humans, we can read the original 3D renders better and the compressed quality tied to actual details adds more characteristics to the art. AI however just saw flaws to be removed, but couldn’t figure out what are flaws, what are details and with what they should be replaced with.

GateKeeper - 22 December 2023 01:46 AM

There are enough similarities to suggest that it might be one of the worst upscales ever though. One of the most embarassing ones is how stars, which are supposed to be distant spots of light through fog, are now planets or moons (entirely different astronomical objects), and they are somehow hanging in the atmosphere fighting the gravity, and one planet is missing half of its size, and another one is attached to that mountain like a fungus or something…? 

That’s the thing - in the original painting the spheres of light are ambiguous. We don’t know what each of them are (stars? moon? clouds? a setting sun?) and the AI goes crazy at that. It wants to turn the brushstrokes into something, when what matters is the artist’s feeling, their impressions and their desire to express those feelings. AI can have an intellectual understanding of those things and what generally appeals and what doesn’t, but struggles with any more than that.

It’s the same with pixel art. The pixels are arranged to create an overall impression of what they’re trying to capture within those limitations. Trying to “smooth” the pixels doesn’t create a better image, and in my view muddies it and makes it flat with no depth.

Charophycean - 21 December 2023 05:42 PM

Each to their own.

Perhaps you’re both just cave-dwellers who prefer chunky pixels to smooth, beautiful hi-res graphics.

(Where’s rtrooney? He’d back me up on this)

Well, maybe not. It’s one thing to dislike pixelated graphics in a game. I think it’s a bad design choice. But it’s one the designer made. The most obvious result of the design choice is that I won’t be purchasing the game.

However, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte was painted from 1884 to 1886. It’s Georges Seurat’s most famous work, and is probably the best know example of the style know as pointillism. It’s also on display at the Art Institute here in Chicago, and as such I’ve had the ability to see it many times. If someone were to ask AI to recreate this masterpiece by removing the one element that makes the painting unique, and then try to pass off this recreation as “Better than the original,” I would be greatly upset.

crumpets - 23 December 2023 06:25 AM

Very cool! I have friends who often turn their nose up at older games due to what they call “a lack of graphics”. Feels like this could be a great way to bring them up to more modern standards for those who prefer it that way.

I don’t think that’s the case at all. I, for one, am quite happy with older games that use a pixelated design by default. What I find irritating is modern games that use “retro-style” pixelation as a design choice.