Nvidia’s DLSS 5 is similar to video game motion smoothing, but worse

This “major achievement” gives everything a special look that has become synonymous with AI-generated art. It’s a bit like motion smoothing, if motion smoothing goes further and changes people’s faces – it makes everything look the same.

This is important to note next time you play mass On PC, Grace won’t suddenly look like she was ripped from a Grok Imagine demo. DLSS 5 won’t be released until the fall, and it will require some powerful hardware to run, which is an optional feature. But it’s technology being pushed by one of the most valuable companies in the world, which has the backing of major video game developers. And they all seem content to associate their games with a very particular aesthetic.

In a statement on Nvidia’s announcement blog, Bethesda president Todd Howard said that “with DLSS 5, art style and detail shine without being restricted by the traditional constraints of real-time rendering,” while noting that the feature will be available in Starfield. Jun Takeuchi, executive producer of many of Capcom’s biggest films, including mass“DLSS 5 represents another important step in pushing visual fidelity forward, helping players become more immersed in the gaming world,” he said. Vampire“.

It’s a bit strange to hear that some of the most influential names in gaming decided it would be great for Nvidia to replace its carefully designed characters with generic, AI-powered versions. In a follow-up tweet, Bethesda noted that what we’re seeing is a “very early look,” and that “the studio’s art teams will further tweak the lighting and final effect to look the way we think best suits each game.” So the version of DLSS 5 available in the fall will probably look very different.

But what are we? We are The vision now points to a bleak future. Artificial intelligence has infiltrated almost every aspect of our lives, and one of the most frustrating ways has been on an aesthetic level. The faces generated by artificial intelligence are a combination of countless images, which are then used to produce a kind of homogeneous ideal. It’s usually easy to recognize thanks to a set of obvious signs: unnaturally smooth skin and uniform features, always cheerful eyes, a smiling mouth with full lips, perfectly styled hair that looks artificial, small noses, and HDR-style lighting that highlights every contour. These can be typical facial features in and of themselves, but when every AI face has all or most of these features, we start to veer toward the Valley of the Uncanny.

That’s why a lot of people reacted so strongly to the faces in Nvidia’s ad: they don’t just look bad, they look like everything else. This same aesthetic is everywhere from Instagram feeds to YouTube thumbnails, and is slowly making its way from social media into traditional forms of entertainment and culture. I haven’t seen it yet A good movie created by artificial intelligenceHowever, they keep coming, and you can identify them from one screen. Nvidia’s new technology is the most obvious example of that stealth gaming aesthetic.

There are a number of reasons why seeing AI corrupting an artist’s work is upsetting for games in particular. The industry has been devastated by layoffs and subsequent studio closures Some expensive bets are misplaced And the post-pandemic slowdown, so the prospect of replacing human labor with waste is not good. It’s also a medium in which a subset of the audience owns some of it Very backwards ideas about what a normal human woman looks likeso somehow making existing characters more generic and more cartoonish through an AI tool is a big problem.

Grace’s face shown through DLSS 5 is an early vision of what things could look like if adoption became more widespread. And if that happens, being a good friend might mean turning it off when you visit, Just like smoothing motion.