Another "how the sausage was made" post

[hunter]

4. Topaz is AI.

I have fewer objections to AI when it is used as a filter rather than a creative tool.

In most scientific uses AI is being used as filter, not as a creative tool, distilling down more data than any human could process. Presumably humans will be able to discern the frequent artifacts this produces.

Topaz does produce discernible artifacts even at low levels of enhancement.

Human vision itself is a similar process. The human eye is a really bad, bad, camera, which is why I sometimes mock Creationists who use it as evidence of some kind of miracle. If some god designed those optics they must have been very drunk, severely hung over, or in a huge hurry, kludging something, anything, together from parts in the junk box.

The magic of human vision is in the post processing. Topaz mimics that post processing, artifacts and all.

Of course AI fails completely as a filter for the internet itself because more than 90% of the internet is crap, not just noise but deliberate misinformation too. That's why AI has ruined search engines.

I think I'd like to play with Topaz but I'm not quite sure what kind of machine to build, preferably a machine built from scrap. The minimum specifications I've seen on their web site seem too low and I don't want to end up with something that's frustratingly sluggish.

I've played a little with web based AI image processing sites, using images I've got no privacy concerns about, and decided I wasn't going to change anything about the way I process photos.