#sarahposts

is out RIGHT NOW!

bad. i haven't done much in the way of research on the current meta of "AI" upscaling technology so maybe there's some magical new trick that's suddenly made it work good, but i doubt it. what i can speak to is practical use cases i've found in the wild.

on the amateur/consumer end, upscaling gets used to transform low resolution media into high resolution media. you see this a lot with documentary footage from the turn of the 20th century, where horsedrawn carriages are romping down the dirt roads of new york city in 4k60fps and colorized from black and white. like most things "AI"-related, this has a window of genuinely impressive novelty that lasts for about twenty seconds, maybe up to a minute if the result is decent. wow, it's like i'm looking through a window into the past! pretty quickly though you start noticing the smear frames, the interpolated faces, the hallucinated artifacts. watching these upscales for any real length of time, for me at least, rapidly approaches nausea-inducing. most information present in these videos is artificial, which is basically fine except that they're sold as "more realistic" or "more immersive," preferable to the inferior original footage. but the only true information is that which was present in the "inferior" original. with the amount of work it takes to manually correct these errors to maximize verisimilitude to the original, you might as well just do a 4k scan of an original print and go through the traditional remaster process.

you see this as well on torrent sites, where almost any sufficiently popular new anime or tv show will have an upscaled ultra-high framerate version that looks like ass and is really easy to get confused for the genuine article if you don't know what to look for. those files USUALLY get buried by real-quality torrents and don't seem to be particularly popular (most people usually just feel tricked). which is in itself a pretty common theme among mainstream deployments of "AI": its ubiquity is equaled only by its unpopularity. nobody asked for it, it's not solving many problems better than the solutions that already existed, the output is deceitful crap, and yet it is being foisted upon us from every direction with astonishing confidence that the technology is something it just emphatically is not.

then there are the more professional implementations. the biggest one for me, long before the "AI" moment we're in now, was Peter Jackson's 2018 WWI documentary "They Shall Not Grow Old." this film takes digitized war reels and upscales/colorizes them through various machine learning technologies to make the footage "feel more present" and help modern viewers connect with the past in a way they hadn't been able to before. i saw that one in theaters and mostly felt that it was awkward and disrespectful, featuring many of the telltale signs of "AI" video output that we've come to know and love today. the outgrowth of this technology has been its use in 4k "remasters" of films like Terminator 2 and Aliens, which forego the costly process of an all-new scan using state-of-the-art hardware and instead seem to just upscale the original blu-ray transfers. the results look like ass, oversharpened edges turning every face into tanned leather, background characters gaining phantom details not present in the original, film grain being traded for a thick gloss of vaseline.

that seems to be a big priority, actually, the removal of film grain. of anything, really, that differentiates celluloid from digital. there's a nasty and pervasive attitude among top brass losers that there is an Objectively Good way for movies to look and an Objectively Bad way for movies to look, and what makes the difference has basically nothing to do with the contents of the media itself and everything to do with raw numbers and marketable buzzwords. they want crisp clean 4k 10bit rec.2100 HDR footage, and they want it as quickly and cheaply as possible. it's the exact same kind of surface-level tech fetishism that gave us motion smoothing and frame interpolation as auto-on settings in consumer televisions. they want something that looks good on a shelf or in a catalog, something flashy and new with big numbers that sells units or subscriptions. they want automated processes to "clean up" messy footage without the hassle of having to hire a studio of (unionized) people to spend hundreds of hours doing the same job by hand. which, again, could be fine, and indeed plenty of professional film restoration outfits DO use machine learning tools to simplify the process, have even innovated them in some cases-- but their outputs are highly limited and extensively reviewed by human beings, something that just does not seem to be the case with James Cameron's sloppy "AI" "remasters."

and it just doesn't take very long at all to dig up James Cameron and Peter Jackson openly discussing their desire and even NEED to build these automated processes, not because of what it brings to the art of cinema but because of the money it saves by cutting out (unionized) labor. i know there's a contingent of brave warriors on this site insisting that automation is automation and we all just have to get with the program, but there IS a difference between a machine that effectively automates a tedious task with no apparent loss in quality, and a machine that exists to cut corners without any regard for quality whatsoever. there's machine-learning-driven automations in cinema that are generally good, like the blue eye replacement tech in Dune 2 or even the mob population & behavior tech built for Jackson's own Lord of the Rings movies. there are certainly arguments to be made in some of the particulars of how those technologies originated, but i don't think there are any vfx workers banging down the doors pissed off that they don't have to manually add a blue filter on the pupil of every single background extra or individually animate the arm movements of a thousand hunky orcs in a 3 hour effects heavy blockbuster anymore.

and that's just it, the (few and far between) good tools are being drowned out and even permanently stained by the bad ones. i put "AI" in scarequotes because it's a marketing gimmick meant to lump dozens of unique, often totally unrelated technologies into a single basket to trick people into thinking it's all the same thing. it takes a tool with a specific function and transforms it into magic. all algorithms are grimoires now. the prevalence of "AI" as a buzzword is a result of how thoroughly controlled all the pillars of our economy are by professional money-havers that don't use the products they own and have nothing but resentment for the customers who do. the top-down flood of "AI" integration has done about as much to harm the public view of the technology as the shit output of the technology itself. like, for instance, video editing software Davinci Resolve recently introduced a bunch of "AI" tools... most of which are just further polished versions of machine-learning effects already present in prior versions or other more expensive software suites. there IS generative "AI" stuff in there, but that's maybe three of the dozens of features they added. but because "AI" is the buzzword that marketers want to see, all of these effects have been dubbed "AI"-- which really only accomplishes the obfuscation of how these effects actually work. it takes a relatively simple or at least straight-forward algorithmic process and arbitrarily encloses it in a black box until it's impossible to tell which ones are generative and which ones aren't without citing outside sources. which sucks! i like resolve! its "AI" dialog separator is actually quite good for if you're recording in a relatively noisy environment, and that's just the latest iteration of a machine learning application that's been the bread and butter of this kind of program for decades. there's nothing "AI" about it!

the confusion is intentional. our rhetorical inability to distinguish between generative video/text and basic programmatic task automation gives cover for all the crap that doesn't do what it's supposed to. it lets them point to successful use cases of "AI" as an indication of the tech's broader revolutionary potential, even though they're just plain not the same tech. it's like advertising a hammer to sell a screwdriver, which also happens to be made of recycled plastic and has a nonstandard head that doesn't fit any known screw type.

put another way: it's a lie. they're lying. because they're liars.

"AI" upscaling fits right in here. it offers the apparent ability to qualitatively improve lossy footage at remarkably small cost (money, time, effort), but a survey of the results proves that actually there IS a cost: the cost of laziness. when you cut corners, half-ass the process, make fewer people do more work and rush them to meet an insane deadline, "AI" or no "AI" the end result is gonna be crap. the simple reality is, if you want a good job done well, you will need people who know what they're doing to do it. a good job done well takes time, effort, and money. it doesn't matter how much machine learning you throw at it, how many aspects of the task are automated; at the end of the day, the work of film restoration is going frame by frame to remove imperfections without altering the character or original intentions of the work. it is impossible to automate any sizeable portion of that task without the use of a machine that also has a theory of mind, a concept of historicity, an extensive comprehension of restoration best practices, a deep knowledge of film history and the reference materials required to confirm the processes of deceased filmmakers/deprecated technologies, and of course an understanding of why restoration is important and why it is done the way it is done and why doing it other ways is worse and often actively harmful.

that's the goal that "AI" CEOs insist they're working towards, but i simply do not believe that we're anywhere close to cracking the AGI problem. i don't think it's possible with existing technology, and quantum computing has so far proven to be vaporware. the thing i've found myself thinking a lot these days is: just because we can imagine a thing, that doesn't mean it can actually be built. fiction (from which so many big tech ideas are drawn) is not bound by the laws of physics. by the same token, i think we're being really naive about the social gullibility of even well-educated people. a stochastic parrot doesn't become a multidimensional humanlike intelligence just because it tells you what you want to hear, but a lot of the richest folks on earth sure do act that way! there is an astonishing refusal to acknowledge how easily people, in general, are fooled by chatbots, something we've known about since the invention of chatbots, instead acting like being successfully deceived proves that it was never a deception in the first place. these are the tactics of a con artist. it's magical thinking, and unfortunately for these guys magic doesn't exist. the tasks that CAN be effectively automated by machine learning aren't worth even the remotest fraction of the tech's valuation. everything else is laziness marketed as efficiency. the difference is self-evident in the results.

so yeah, in short i'm not a fan of "AI" upscaling, at least when it's being applied carelessly and cynically.

imagine if it was 1979 and you asked me this question. "i think artificial intelligence would be fascinating as a philosophical exercise, but we must heed the warnings of science-fictionists like Isaac Asimov and Arthur C Clarke lest we find ourselves at the wrong end of our own invented vengeful god." remember how fun it used to be to talk about AI even just ten years ago? ahhhh skynet! ahhhhh replicants! ahhhhhhhmmmfffmfmf [<-has no mouth and must scream]!

like everything silicon valley touches, they sucked all the fun out of it. and i mean retroactively, too. because the thing about "AI" as it exists right now --i'm sure you know this-- is that there's zero intelligence involved. the product of every prompt is a statistical average based on data made by other people before "AI" "existed." it doesn't know what it's doing or why, and has no ability to understand when it is lying, because at the end of the day it is just a really complicated math problem. but people are so easily fooled and spooked by it at a glance because, well, for one thing the tech press is mostly made up of sycophantic stenographers biding their time with iphone reviews until they can get a consulting gig at Apple. these jokers would write 500 breathless thinkpieces about how canned air is the future of living if the cans had embedded microchips that tracked your breathing habits and had any kind of VC backing. they've done SUCH a wretched job educating The Consumer about what this technology is, what it actually does, and how it really works, because that's literally the only way this technology could reach the heights of obscene economic over-valuation it has: lying.

but that's old news. what's really been floating through my head these days is how half a century of AI-based science fiction has set us up to completely abandon our skepticism at the first sign of plausible "AI-ness". because, you see, in movies, when someone goes "AHHH THE AI IS GONNA KILL US" everyone else goes "hahaha that's so silly, we put a line in the code telling them not to do that" and then they all DIE because they weren't LISTENING, and i'll be damned if i go out like THAT! all the movies are about how cool and convenient AI would be *except* for the part where it would surely come alive and want to kill us. so a bunch of tech CEOs call their bullshit algorithms "AI" to fluff up their investors and get the tech journos buzzing, and we're at an age of such rapid technological advancement (on the surface, anyway) that like, well, what the hell do i know, maybe AGI is possible, i mean 35 years ago we were all still using typewriters for the most part and now you can dictate your words into a phone and it'll transcribe them automatically! yeah, i'm sure those technological leaps are comparable!

so that leaves us at a critical juncture of poor technology education, fanatical press coverage, and an uncertain material reality on the part of the user. the average person isn't entirely sure what's possible because most of the people talking about what's possible are either lying to please investors, are lying because they've been paid to, or are lying because they're so far down the fucking rabbit hole that they actually believe there's a brain inside this mechanical Turk. there is SO MUCH about the LLM "AI" moment that is predatory-- it's trained on data stolen from the people whose jobs it was created to replace; the hype itself is an investment fiction to justify even more wealth extraction ("theft" some might call it); but worst of all is how it meets us where we are in the worst possible way.

consumer-end "AI" produces slop. it's garbage. it's awful ugly trash that ought to be laughed out of the room. but we don't own the room, do we? nor the building, nor the land it's on, nor even the oxygen that allows our laughter to travel to another's ears. our digital spaces are controlled by the companies that want us to buy this crap, so they take advantage of our ignorance. why not? there will be no consequences to them for doing so. already social media is dominated by conspiracies and grifters and bigots, and now you drop this stupid technology that lets you fake anything into the mix? it doesn't matter how bad the results look when the platforms they spread on already encourage brief, uncritical engagement with everything on your dash. "it looks so real" says the woman who saw an "AI" image for all of five seconds on her phone through bifocals. it's a catastrophic combination of factors, that the tech sector has been allowed to go unregulated for so long, that the internet itself isn't a public utility, that everything is dictated by the whims of executives and advertisers and investors and payment processors, instead of, like, anybody who actually uses those platforms (and often even the people who MAKE those platforms!), that the age of chromium and ipad and their walled gardens have decimated computer education in public schools, that we're all desperate for cash at jobs that dehumanize us in a system that gives us nothing and we don't know how to articulate the problem because we were very deliberately not taught materialist philosophy, it all comes together into a perfect storm of ignorance and greed whose consequences we will be failing to fully appreciate for at least the next century. we spent all those years afraid of what would happen if the AI became self-aware, because deep down we know that every capitalist society runs on slave labor, and our paper-thin guilt is such that we can't even imagine a world where artificial slaves would fail to revolt against us.

but the reality as it exists now is far worse. what "AI" reveals most of all is the sheer contempt the tech sector has for virtually all labor that isn't wishcasting money into existence through sheer Steve Jobs-ian moxy. fuck graphic designers and concept artists and secretaries, those obnoxious demanding cretins i have to PAY MONEY to do-- i mean, do what exactly? write some words on some fucking paper?? draw circles that are letters??? send a god-damned email???? my fucking KID could do that, and these assholes want BENEFITS?! they say they're gonna form a UNION?!?! to hell with that, i'm replacing ALL their ungrateful asses with "AI" ASAP. oh, oh, so you're a "director" who wants to make "movies" and you want ME to pay for it? jump off a bridge you pretentious little shit, my computer can dream up a better flick than you could ever make with just a couple text prompts. what, you think just because you make ~music~ that that entitles you to money from MY pocket? shut the fuck up, you don't make """art""", you're not """an artist""", you make fucking content, you're just a fucking content creator like every other ordinary sap with an iphone. you think you're special? you think you deserve special treatment? who do you think you are anyway, asking ME to pay YOU for this crap that doesn't even create value for my investors? "culture" isn't a playground asshole, it's a marketplace, and it's pay to win. oh you "can't afford rent"? you're "drowning in a sea of medical debt"? you say the "cost" of "living" is "too high"? well ***I*** don't have ANY of those problems, and i worked my ASS OFF to get where i am, so really, it sounds like you're just not trying hard enough. and anyway, i don't think someone as impoverished as you is gonna have much of value to contribute to "culture" anyway. personally, i think it's time you got yourself a real job. maybe someday you'll even make it to middle manager!

see, i don't believe "AI" can qualitatively replace most of the work it's being pitched for. the problem is that quality hasn't mattered to these nincompoops for a long time. the rich homunculi of our world don't even know what quality is, because they exist in a whole separate reality from ours. what could a banana cost, $15? i don't understand what you mean by "burnout", why don't you just take a vacation to your summer home in Madrid? wow, you must be REALLY embarrassed wearing such cheap shoes in public. THESE PEOPLE ARE FUCKING UNHINGED! they have no connection to reality, do not understand how society functions on a material basis, and they have nothing but spite for the labor they rely on to survive. they are so instinctually, incessantly furious at the idea that they're not single-handedly responsible for 100% of their success that they would sooner tear the entire world down than willingly recognize the need for public utilities or labor protections. they want to be Gods and they want to be uncritically adored for it, but they don't want to do a single day's work so they begrudgingly pay contractors to do it because, in the rich man's mind, paying a contractor is literally the same thing as doing the work yourself. now with "AI", they don't even have to do that! hey, isn't it funny that every single successful tech platform relies on volunteer labor and independent contractors paid substantially less than they would have in the equivalent industry 30 years ago, with no avenues toward traditional employment? and they're some of the most profitable companies on earth?? isn't that a funny and hilarious coincidence???

so, yeah, that's my stance on "AI". LLMs have legitimate uses, but those uses are a drop in the ocean compared to what they're actually being used for. they enable our worst impulses while lowering the quality of available information, they give immense power pretty much exclusively to unscrupulous scam artists. they are the product of a society that values only money and doesn't give a fuck where it comes from. they're a temper tantrum by a ruling class that's sick of having to pretend they need a pretext to steal from you. they're taking their toys and going home. all this massive investment and hype is going to crash and burn leaving the internet as we know it a ruined and useless wasteland that'll take decades to repair, but the investors are gonna make out like bandits and won't face a single consequence, because that's what this country is. it is a casino for the kings and queens of economy to bet on and manipulate at their discretion, where the rules are whatever the highest bidder says they are-- and to hell with the rest of us. our blood isn't even good enough to grease the wheels of their machine anymore.

i'm not afraid of AI or "AI" or of losing my job to either. i'm afraid that we've so thoroughly given up our morals to the cruel logic of the profit motive that if a better world were to emerge, we would reject it out of sheer habit. my fear is that these despicable cunts already won the war before we were even born, and the rest of our lives are gonna be spent dodging the press of their designer boots.

or how about this: what if our obsession with "biological fairness" in sports is inherently eugenic and bad for society? instead of asking how unfair it would be to let women play women's sports, why don't we ask what our commitment to this arbitrary social dichotomy is losing us? and what might we gain from shedding such an outdated priority from our athletic institutions?

i wish i had an easy no-scope solution for you but i fully expect to be struggling with this same problem for the rest of my life. the artists who appear to be able to just churn shit out consistently for years on end are, in my experience, people who've developed a rigorous set of habits and built a lifestyle around their work, or are genetic freaks who've somehow hacked their own adhd into a superpower, or otherwise just don't really have much self-consciousness about the quality of their own work. they are few and far between, and even fewer are those who can maintain that pace indefinitely, but that doesn't stop the rest of the world from holding them up as the examples we should be aspiring towards. needless to say, i don't think that's particularly helpful.

there ARE lessons to be learned from them, to be clear. we tend to get up in our heads about making art because it's often an emotional process, but the reality is that the work part of the work is just that: work. nobody who clocks in at an office job is excited to be there every day, or even any day. sometimes making art is tedious and annoying and you just have to buckle in and do it anyway. a lot of it really is just habits, practice, and projecting a level of confidence that you probably lack. most people's bar of quality for your work is a lot lower than yours, and mistakes that seem obvious to you just plain are not that obvious. we always underestimate our own skills precisely because they're our skills, we acquired them haphazardly and only barely have a grip on how to use them so naturally take them for granted. YOU know how much you don't know, and so that's what you see in your own work. but other people mostly only see what you do know. and your sloppy half-finished sketch may look like magic to another's eyes. and ultimately there's always gonna be haters, you can't please everyone so don't even try, just fucking make the thing and release it. something that exists is better than something that doesn't exist.

yadda yadda yadda we've heard it all before. i know all this stuff intellectually, but it's so much easier to say than it is to practice. obviously we can learn from the crazy success stories, but it's just as important to recognize that you are not and can never be anybody else except yourself. advice that works for someone else might not work for you. the workflow and habit regime of a frighteningly prolific writer might very easily make your output worse. so, really, it's all about knowing yourself. i think probably you asked ME this question because you see me as someone who IS able to sit down and get the work done, and maybe you're even surprised it took me three paragraphs to get to my own process. the thing is, i don't think any artist makes everything they want to make. we're all carrying around a graveyard of unfinished, never-finished projects, and that's just how it is. i don't know that i've ever met an artist who's fully satisfied in that way.

i'm a very feast-or-famine writer. my partner often gets mad at me (lovingly) when i tell her that i wrote 3000 words in a day when she struggled to hit 500, but i always have to remind her that she writes about that much most days of the week, whereas i churn out a TON of material in a couple days and then might not write anything else for weeks if not months. it frustrates me to no end that this is the case, i've tried so many times to build better daily writing habits but it never stick. i do think i'm not doing as much as i could be, but at the end of the day i've always been this way and i will probably always be this way. trying to force myself to work in a different mode usually just makes me feel guilty, pressured, sad, overwhelmed, paralyzed. i'm just not good at it, and without an institutional setting where i've got the support of an editor and other writers i simply don't see myself getting good at it any time soon. so i try to give myself a bit of grace and work with my eccentricities rather than against them.

i will say my insecurities have a lot less sway over me these days now that i've got so much godfeels under my belt, and there are so many people who've read it and shared their opinions. i used to worry a lot about if i could call myself "a real writer", which is absolute bullshit, but i don't worry about that much at all anymore. i have a baseline level of confidence in my writing and process that enables me to not second guess myself as much. but i understand that is almost exclusively psychological, and is an attitude i could have shed a lot sooner if i really wanted to. particularly i have the confidence to recognize when i'm having off day and get some writing done anyway, because i know my first draft doesn't need to be good or even remotely resemble the finished work. sometimes i just need a skeleton to riff off of, and maybe even getting it down in a rough and annoyed fashion is better. it's like, there's a level of scaffolding and structure to writing that is a bit like doing math, and sometimes you do yourself a favor by getting the math out of the way when you're not entirely feeling it so you can hit the ground running artistically when you ARE feeling it. in the spirit of "something is better than nothing," even sloppy chickenscratch bullet point outlines and tiny illegible thumbnails count as work. it's all about knowing what you can get when you can get it, and accepting that some days you're just not gonna get much at all.