Zoom And Enhance

For many years now, fans of TV crime drama and sometimes science fiction have been taking the piss out of episodes featuring image enhancement. You know the trope: "stop, that frame, now zoom in, can you enhance that?" and four pixels are sharpened into a UHD quality portrait. Supposedly there are algorithms that can do this, and by coincidence this is something the geekiest member of the CSI:Your Town Here crew has been working on in their spare time. A selection of particularly amusing examples has been compiled by Duncan Robson in the YouTube video above.

However the game has changed. Until recently we could simply laugh and say that no such algorithm exists. Now we know what the algorithm is - it's Stable Diffusion, the principle used by Midjourney, Dall-E and other generative art AIs. And it's no longer impossible - instead it's dangerous. AIs are prone to bursts of creativity and "hallucinations" (the term used by AI scientists to mean "lying"). When an AI enhances an image, the face that is digitally pencilled in doesn't have to be the actual face of the suspect seen on CCTV, it just has to be a plausible image. It could be anyone's face. It could be your face.

So here's my question: how many innocent fictional people in episodes of CSI have been wrongly convicted of the most heinous crimes on the basis of an AI-enhanced image?

JUSTICE FOR FICTIONAL IMAGE ENHANCEMENT VICTIMS NOW

Here’s One We Made Earlier [Review: The Creator]

CONTAINS HUMAN-GENERATED CONTENT

I’ve followed Gareth Edwards’ career with interest ever since his short film Factory Farmed won the Sci-Fi London 48 Hour Film Competition in 2008. He went on to make the low-budget feature Monsters, in which two journalists make their way through alien-infested Mexico, followed by two mega-franchise movies, Godzilla and Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, and now by his new film The Creator.

The Creator is a high-budget sci-fi/war movie epic with a cast of hundreds, a globe-spanning plot and CGI effects in almost every scene – but it’s an original story, not part of a franchise or cinematic universe. It concerns the rise of AI and the war between anti-AI Westerners and a pro-AI Asian nation, seen through the eyes of American soldier Joshua played by John David Washington. It’s well cast and well acted, particularly by Washington, national treasure Gemma Chan and child actor Madeleine Yuna Voyles, and together with the consistently good effects it’s an enjoyable and satisfying movie although I would say the plot is a little simplistic and one-sided, setting up a clear good vs evil story rather than engaging with the complexities of AI that we are grappling with in the real world.

I’ve always admired Edwards’ ability to use CGI intelligently to build believable worlds. Here it contributes to the setting of a believable alternative history where robots and AI became commonplace early in the 20^th century, extended into the near future when the action takes place. Although it has its own distinctive visual style The Creator is not without influence from other movies – in particular many of the robot designs have definitely been touched by Star Wars. Roger roger.

Score: Three stably diffused stars out of five.

All movies reviewed on The Sci-Fi Gene blog are awarded three stars out of five.

Update 7.10.2023: The Guardian has also reviewed this film. Their review is correct (apart from the star rating).