11 hours Ago By Matt Jancer
What in the blue hell is going on at Netflix? First, Netflix skeeved everyone out last December by using AI to not just dub but also morph the mouths of actors on La Palma to match it. Now, Netflix has brought back a Desert Storm-era classic, A Different World—but they took it through the AI polishing machine to upscale its resolution.If you’ve got a Netflix subscription, you’re free as of right now to go watch it.
That is, if you’re not put off by parts of peoples’ bodies looking like lava lamp effects and strange background artifacts that appear like glitches in the Matrix. @shanselman They used artificial intelligence #AI upscaling on #ADifferentWorld and it..
.sucks. #Netflix and a Different World ♬ original sound – Scott Hanselman a different world, a different lookAs Scott Hanselman details in his TikTok post above, the upscaling has had strange effects on the show.
Mouths look grafted on, like those Conan O’Brien skits where they’d superimpose people’s lips on photos to make them look as if they were talking.Objects in the background, such as tennis rackets and posters, look incomplete and misshapen. It doesn’t look all that much different than the grotesque images that generative AIs produce, just grafted into a live-action sitcom.
Remember A Different World? That’s ok. If you grew up with it when it was broadcast from 1987 to 1993, it was primetime television on NBC. If you grew up afterward, like me, you probably weren’t ever aware of it.
A Different World never got the level of syndication that other classics, such as The Beverly Hillbillies and The Cosby Show, got in the ’90s, so younger generations also were never introduced to its reruns in the same way.Fuck Bill Cosby, and I can’t remember the last time I watched The Cosby Show, but A Different World is a spin-off that follows Denise Huxtable as she attends college and features very little of the other show’s cast.If you’ve ever played an old show on a modern, high-definition TV, you noticed that it looked like shit, like someone smeared Vaseline over the screen.
That’s because they shot programs of that era in 360p (usually), and people were watching them on CRT televisions. Nobody missed higher definition because we wouldn’t have been able to see it on our screens, anyway.In the mid-’90s, my family had a 36-inch TV that was large enough to drop on a Wile E.
Coyote’s head or shelter three Boxcar Children inside (if it were hollow). And friends considered that huge for the time.There’s almost certainly going to be AI meddling in our streaming future.
I’d prefer not, but if Amazon’s Prime Video, which introduced AI dubbing of its own, can pull it off in a way that expands access without transmogrifying the people on screen into hideously morphed creatures, then it’ll be a welcome relief from Netflix’s early two attempts.Netflix will surely try again, and the technology will surely get better. Until then, you’re free to check out this psychosis-inflicted throwback, like a mild shroom high without the shrooms.
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