Johnny was a chemist’s son.

If a fan released this as a shader injector, I think it would be celebrated.

Nvidia pushing it under their brand for upscaling is fuck-right-off territory.

If they’d talked to… anyone, beforehand, they’d know RE9’s graphics don’t need help. Show us how this affects unmodded Skyrim. Show us LA Noire actually looking like all the actors it stars. Real-time style transfer surely works the other way too; show us Doom Eternal as a cartoon. Make it a silly thing users can do, rather than yet another bullshit feature to bribe into new games and lord over AMD. Were the anti-competitive margins from CUDA not comfortable enough?

Plenty of games pursue photorealism - they just don’t brag about it like Kojima. I’d count every game that got as close as technology allowed, then changed just enough to dodge the uncanny valley. Halo Infinite is stylized; the original game is just old. LA Noire advertised its verisimilitude and now looks like any other seventh-gen title. People have been going “holy shit, it’s so real!” since, like, Night Driver.

The good ending from here is the end of that arms race.

Half the push for ballooning budgets and decade-long dev cycles has been escalating standards for what feels real-ish. RDR2 cost half a billion dollars and shipped with fifty gigabytes of visual assets. It already feels only as pretty as modded GTA V. But a filter like this presumably works fine on RDR… 1. A game that cost a lot less, took a fraction as long to come out, and desperately lacks several graphical features we now take for granted. If your graphical style is “like realism, but” then you can now jump straight into the uncanny valley from models someone banged out on a Friday afternoon.

In other words, 2027 kinda graphics, with 2007 kinda budgets.

What’s more likely to happen is that behemoth publishers will hire even more people to do everything the hard way, and then also fight this instant realism filter, so it only looks the way it already looked when they did things the hard way. Because nothing good is allowed to happen ever again.

The Elder Scrolls would be interesting if it was touching up Morrowind graphics. Like instead of a remaster, they did a minimum-effort re-release based on OpenMW, but included official text-to-speech and style-transfer models. Bind a toggle key so you can activate CHIM mode and see the generic imperial male face beneath the actor telling you a little story.

Admittedly the dice-roll combat would be even sillier as fake live action. A playable version of those Oblivion skits.

I should say: a game hallucinating detail like this would be sick. Spend a hot nanosecond rendering some PS3-quality animation with PS2-quality graphics, shunt that into a very weird shader, get high photorealism that maybe doesn’t look the same if you turn around and look back. Probably with diegetic framing, like being in a dream. A shooter where you’re fighting your way out of a coma. Use all that GPU grunt to make a tinny saxophone soundtrack as you play.

But when you’re just bumping the resolution? Fuck off.

Dinguses went from reconstructing a noisy render to Half-Life Reimagined With AI.

The simplest answer-- okay the simplest answer is, fuck copyright.

The simplest nuanced answer is, “rewrite this” isn’t original. No more than throwing someone’s photograph through a filter and claiming you made it. So you can’t un-GPL any block of code just by changing all the variable names, or minifying it, or telling Claude to translate it to Rust.

But if you delete everything besides the comments - is that the same program? I would say probably, especially if you’re already familiar with the missing code. Even a human author might recreate some parts verbatim. Even a wildly different result could have been achieved by not deleting anything, and just shuffling things around for the sake of difference. If you turn the ship of Theseus into a house it’s still made of the same wood.

So at what point is a human-authored do-over not the same program?

Say this guy took a sabbatical, cabin in the woods situation, and came back with exactly the code Claude would write. Of course he’s deeply familiar with the existing library. It sounds like he’s been primarily responsible for it, for a while. Is he now incapable of writing a differently-licensed alternative that does the same thing?

I think it’s called The Metamorphosis Of Prime Intellect.

Misread the headline and briefly felt the world was a better place.

That’s why Zaphod funded Eccentra Gallumbits.

The entire world is turning the same kind of stupid.

Everything works in theory.

Both are extremely stolen.

The way y’all overuse the word “slop” is like calling all e-mail “spam.” Both are supposed to refer to a deluge of nonsense nobody asked for. This author has an LLM in-the-loop, plainly on purpose and with purpose, and it seems to be working out.

If any interaction with spicy autocomplete is treated as equally bad, to the point of aggressive mockery - no kidding people will tune that out. It’s not constructive or sincere. It borders on abusive. How much coverage did this guy just get, where the comments are all ‘well if he’d just done [blank]–,’ and how many people actually believe that [blank] would result in fewer snide comments?

They’d assume that anyway. The self-proclaimed haters have a one-drop rule.

That’s why this author didn’t exactly announce it - they were trying to dodge a harassment campaign.

Awesome, so you push a button and work gets done. Adding “and then I get all the money” has two polite answers. The first is “Why?” and the second is “What money?”

And it’s not like servers have gotten harder to run! Pirates serve terabytes of data that’s straight-up illegal! Your fuckin’ commercial connection should be plenty for any damn thing you want.

Satire of toxic masculinity is doomed because the target audience Will Not Get It.

I don’t give a shit what children see.

They’ll live.

Stop spying on adults.

Bringus: this setup, IRL.