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