Netflix Used AI To Upscale 'A Different World' and It's a Melted Nightmare

Netflix has deployed AI upscaling on the 1987-1993 sitcom "A Different World," resulting in significant visual artifacts documented by technology commentator Scott Hanselman. The AI processing, intended to enhance the original 360p footage for modern displays, has generated distortions resembling "lava lamp effects" on actors' bodies, improperly rendered mouths, and misshapen background objects including posters and tennis rackets. This marks Netflix's second controversial AI implementation in recent months, following December's AI-powered dubbing and mouth morphing on "La Palma."

Re:

[brunoblack]

has generated distortions resembling "lava lamp effects" on actors' bodies, improperly rendered mouths, and misshapen background objects including posters and tennis rackets.

Sounds just like translivergrunt posts!

What is a "translivergrunt" post? I can't find anything on DuckDuckGo and then I tried Google.

Re:

[ihavesaxwithcollies]

No, there is one crazy person that follows him around and writes long-winded, lunatic rambling, crazy, obsessive posts about him. The lunatic is a rabid trumper that has overt and obvious mental issues and should be locked up.

Re:

[rsilvergun]

That would be anything I post while wearing drag. Which is fewer posts than you think but still more than you'd expect.

Also my stalker is now commenting even before I do. Which is hilarious.

What else can AI do?

[RightwingNutjob]

Can it slice? Can it dice? Can it prepare a five-star, three-course dinner out of a can of beans, an onion, and leftover cold cuts?

Can it replace too-big-for-their-britches skeptics who doubt the flawlessness of AI-generated content?

Can it down-vote my post before breakfast?

Can it play a game?

Can it dominate all the slashdot headlines for days on end to stay relevant?

Who knows?

Where's a link to the video?

[backslashdot]

There's one screenshot on there, I think .. but where's a video showing this? A link I could find was https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com] but it doesn't look terrible. I think this is a great idea though, though they definitely need to keep improving the technology. I would like to see my favorite 70s and 80s shows get upscaled.

Re: Where's a link to the video?

[topham]

There's a funny thing with video where if you distort anything other than the focus of the scene the core audience doesn't notice it. You pretty much have to be neurodivergent to notice because it isn't the part of the scene that is intended to be the focus.

Re:

[rsilvergun]

I guess but then why bother upscaling in the 1st place?

The ***** Show

[Kunedog]

I was planning to link this vid even before the one liner at the end:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

The original 360p video

[50000BTU_barbecue]

Was the summary written by AI as well? Standard definition NTSC video would be described as 480i, come on now.

Re: The original 360p video

[modecx]

If the article was written by AI, it would have probably been less shitty in general.

Re:

[TurboStar]

The 360p is likely the source resolution netflix serves up. Converting 480i60 to 360p30 doesn't lose much fidelity so it's common for streaming.

I don't understand why a less-than-ideal upscaling is a "nightmare". It's not like they destroyed the source and can't do it over with a better, future AI.

Do they have any quality control?

[MpVpRb]

Does anybody critically watch it before release?
Or do they simply not care
Old-school upscaling doesn't require AI and it's probably all the show needs

Not "360p"

[PhantomHarlock]

Programs shot for NTSC television were the analog equivalent of 720X486i (interlaced) at D1 aspect ratio. This is a whole lot of stuff that few people remember now.

The frame rate was 60 fields per second, with every odd line producing a 1/2 vertical resolution frame at 30 FPS and every even line producing same. With an overall refresh rate of 15khz on an NTSC CRT TV, it was easy to get a noticeable flicker artifact if graphics and camera images were too sharp, so there was a lot of filtering and anti-alia

Re:

[backslashdot]

Thanks for your insights. I think AI can eventually (10 years from now?) do a good job of "filling in the missing information" in a credible manner. Frankly what Netflix has done doesn't seem like AI .. a lot of it looks like they simply vectorized the scene and then enlarged it to more pixels. The AI would have to be about 10 times smarter than what we have today. For example if a close up shot in the original of a person reveals he has a mole, that mole better needs to be there in wider shots that have b

"Netflix Used AI To..."

[hcs_$reboot]

The title is misleading. The title implies that AI is to blame, unable to do what it's supposed to. Today's AI is perfectly capable of getting good results for this type of task. The problem they had is mainly due to the algorithms they chose to use and how they were implemented.