AI upscaling ruins another classic retro game

A viral Twitter thread full of AI interpretations of Virtua Fighter characters has offered a reminder of the horrible future the new wave of algorithmically-generated art has in store for us.

Shared by Colin Williamson on Twitter earlier this month, you can see a lengthy gallery of images in which an algorithm has converted the blocky character models of 1993's Virtua Fighter. Sarah looks… well, basically okay, like she came from a mediocre mid-2000s comic book variant cover. Everyone else? I can't. I just can not.

The thread quickly went viral, and Williamson was actually interviewed by Ars Technica about the upscales. Williamson explains that he used the img2img mode of the Stable Diffusion AI model, which simply required him to supply an image and a brief description of what was in it - the AI would then spit out these horrors. "I'd do a batch of around 50 and cherry-pick the funniest ones. I tried this thing called 'negative prompting,' where you tell the AI stuff like 'please don't draw messed-up-looking hands,' which does an excellent job in that now your characters have only six fingers instead of seven."

These Virtua Fighter images work as comedy, at least, and that's clearly the way they're intended. I may be in the minority in having a very difficult time looking at intentional AI upscales of other old games, though. That AI FF7 remaster? For my money, those pre-rendered PS1 backgrounds were never meant to look so sharp. The art of these old games just can't hold up when interpreted with that level of detail.

Admittedly, yes, I probably sound like a vinyl record nerd trying to sell you on the 'warmth' of analog audio. For somewhat more modern games, at least, AI-driven tools like Nvidia's RTX Remix are creating some impressive results. I don't think ray tracing is going to make that Akira look any better, though.

The horrors aren't over, sadly. Virtua Cop has gotten the same treatment.

The best retro games don't need AIs to make them beautiful.