Will Smith's concert crowds are real, but AI is blurring the lines
41 comments
·August 26, 2025ulrikrasmussen
conradfr
That's hilarious https://i.imgur.com/TVfncya.png
moefh
That's insane. Here's the same-ish frame from the original: https://imgur.com/a/dWS20oP
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 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".
brap
I remember watching an episode of one of my favorite shows on my parents’ brand new TV, and thought to myself something about this episode is off, like the production is cheap, the acting feels worse, even the dialog is bad.
Over time I noticed everything looks cheaper on their TV.
It was the auto-smoothing.
hliyan
This phenomenon of pushing technology that end consumers don't want, seem to be driven by a simple sequence of incentives: pressure from shareholders to maintain/increase stock price -> pressure on business to increase market share, raise prices, or at least showcase promising future tech -> pressure on PMs to build new features -> combined with developers' desire to try out new technologies -> result: AI chatbots/summaries on things we didn't ask for, touchscreens on car dashboards, AI upscaling etc.
ageitgey
The AI upscaling makes it look like NIN are playing with late-1980s era Rick Astley. Hilarious.
justinator
That is terrible.
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.
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rightbyte
The closeups of the bass player are like 6 slowmotion frames in the original and look like an interpolated mess with unhuman body joints upscaled.
energy123
The most upvoted comment is "Thank you so much for preserving this!!"
black_puppydog
Holy... wtf...
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.
MrGilbert
Also, David Bowie looks like a 20-something-year old man in this shot.
jader201
Two root comments (so far) are focusing on YouTube, but the article claims most of the AI was done by Will’s team, using AI to convert stills to video:
> 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.
ares623
Some PM in Youtube: “ yes let’s make it harder to tell real videos from AI to make people who don’t know better more susceptible and accepting of it”
cyanydeez
Thats the future. Kids arnt going to have the same mental history as older generayions.
ojagodzinski
Open an company that sells t-shirts with "AI glitched" text on it so people can make every foto of this kind illegitimate.
aitchnyu
In a couple of years, they can go into same junk drawer of sixth finger prosthetics (generative AI problem) and 5-eyes masks (face recognition problem).
gherkinnn
https://www.theverge.com/youtube/765485/is-youtubes-shorts-e...
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.
merelysounds
> GenAI upscaling in YT shorts
I cannot watch the video, but the linked description quotes “not generative AI”; is The Verge or someone else showing something different?
foota
I wonder if the fact that the original video was AI generated made the upscaling look worse than it would on a real video? Not that it can certainly be detected, but an actual video is likely different from an AI generated in ways that it seems like could lead astray their "computational photography" processing.
black_puppydog
So... the videos showing the difference between the AI-tainted youtube version and the supposedly untainted instagram version are hosted on... youtube?
ch_sm
apparently the sharpening algorithm is only applied on youtube shorts, not on regular youtube videos.
superchink
the experimental post processing was only applied to shorts, according to the post.
cobertos
What's the point of using videos like this if it's a risk to reputation just to use them?
hamdingers
The people with whom this is a reputational risk were not going to buy Will Smith concert tickets anyway.
jacquesm
The same reason you don't feed prime vegetables and fruits to pigs.
jonplackett
Saving money of course! That’s the sad truth
hanspeter
What's the point of saving money if it's a risk to reputation?
cyanydeez
Will smith punched a dude on stage, a comedian. I think you are putting a lot on a cage concept with a scatter plot of outliers.
You actually need a reputation of merit for there to be risk. Hes a rapper, not a saint or Ethicist.
wordofx
I’m wondering at what point the minority are going to finally accept ai is here to stay.
14213112
there are no risk of reputation until you use it. further more, even within creative professions, using Gen AI is already acceptable to some degree.
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hettygreen
What happens when AI gets trained on AI slop?
If there's code to stop AI from being trained on AI, I would like to have it from stopping me from seeing it.
cyanydeez
Better question is what happens when a generation knows nothing but slop
bananapub
doesn't seem very blurry - don't generate video of a crowd? seems like an easy rule?
booleandilemma
I hate how everyone thinks we have to use AI now. I wish this trend would end already.
ttflee
TLDR: The video got VAEed, and we are the discriminators being fooled.
I think AI-"upscaled" videos are as jarring to look at as a newly bought TV before frame smoothing has been disabled. Who seriously thinks this looks better, even if the original is a slightly grainy recording from the 90's?
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.