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Comment on Nvidia Announces DLSS 5, and it adds... An AI slop filter over your game

AmbitiousProcess@piefed.social ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

Look closely at the images, what do you notice about the face?

Darker eyebrows, more pronounced eye bags, deeper red, more pronounced, and slightly more cracked lips, and accented shading and slight tweaks to facial shape to fit more traditional beauty standards.

It’s not just making it “more realistic”, it’s passing the artist’s original intent through a filter that actually changes the way the character looks. Using the traits I described earlier, you could assume different things about the character than was intended. Darker and larger eye bags could imply worse sleep. The cracked lips could signify worse health, but the color could imply better health. The shape and shading on her face overall also changes how attractive and average/unaverage she’s expected to appear in terms of looks.

Plus, when you think about how this is applied, it’s not just some static application to a character model. It’s effectively a full filter over your game. These traits could all change by the second as lighting or angle changes even slightly, which only makes it harder to determine the actual intended state and appearance of characters or an environment.

Things like this are visible in other images from the article, too.

For example, the older woman holding a wand. the wrinkles on her face darken and become so much more visible that you could be forgiven for thinking it was meant to be her like 5 or 10 years later, and on the image after that in the compare tool, the lighting on the dude’s face entirely changes to make him more front-lit.

This is fundamentally altering the way things look from the intent of the artists and developers.

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ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
I look at the face and see one image that looks like a face from a game 5 years ago, and another that looks like that face became an actual person. You couldn’t make it look like an actual person without changing some of the details from the original.

Plus, if you don’t like it, it’s 1 click away from just turning dlss off.

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- AmbitiousProcess@piefed.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  You couldn’t make it look like an actual person without changing some of the details from the original.
  
  I think it could have at least done without literally plumping up her lips and changing their shape, don’t you?
  
  image
  
  Sure, it looks more realistic, but it still alters how the character is intended to look within the game’s environment and story.
  
  Hell, even the entire environment just… gets brighter. You can genuinely just see more in the shadows, fog becomes less apparent, etc. This, again, alters the original artistic intent, and changes how the game appears and plays relative to the original.
  
  Plus, if you don’t like it, it’s 1 click away from just turning dlss off.
  
  I am upset because:
  
  NVIDIA is wasting time and money developing something most people don’t want, rather than a form of DLSS that would genuinely improve people’s experience
  
  I do not want a world where every single game I play requires me to repeatedly disable this version of DLSS just for it to look the way the developers intended
  
  While I will certainly disable this (assuming they can even run it on just 1 GPU since it currently takes 2), a lot of people simply won’t, because they won’t realize it’s on, only that the game “feels off”. For a widespread, real-world example of this, take motion smoothing on TVs. Most people dislike the way it looks overall, but just assume it’s either how their TV is, or how the films are. The same effect will no doubt happen with games. People will just assume it’s something with their GPU, their monitor, or the way the developers built the game, all the while having that feeling that something is just a bit off or not as good as it should be. The uncanny valley effect is very real, and it’s what most people have a problem with here. It just reeks of “AI image trying to look like a person” rather than “video/photo of a person”
  
  I am not upset because I think I personally can’t disable it. I don’t believe the world revolves around me, so I don’t judge something’s effects solely on how it will affect me and only me.
  
  Just like motion smoothing, this will just be widespread, enabled by default, and something that claims to make things look “better”, while producing odd visual artifacts and an uncanny valley effect that many people won’t realize the root cause of, and will perpetually have a worse gaming experience from as a result. That is why I believe this is a problem.
  
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  - ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    I could agree, but who says that devs won’t take advantage of this once it’s in widespread use, and unlike motion sensing, PC gamers are very used to adjusting their settings to get the fps and look that they want. I can’t even think of a PC game where one of the first things I did wasn’t to go muck around in the graphics settings.
    
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