I retract my previous excitement, Killer7’s remastered cutscenes use generative AI upscaling and they suck (Update)

[Update: Engine Software has stated via Twitter that they will be adding an option to revert the cutscenes and upscaled textures back to the way they were originally in the port. Both cutscenes and textures can be changed individually, and the additional quality-of-life changes made in the recent update will remain. However, they have stated that these are still the PS2 version of the cutscenes that the port used before, and not the higher quality GameCube version. Our original story follows.]

On Friday, I reported that the 2018 PC port of Killer7 has received a latter-day update that, among other things, remasters the cutscenes, which were previously just upscaled the old-fashioned way. Pretty cool! But like anything cool these days, it comes with a massive caveat: the remastered cutscenes are full of AI hallucinations.

Remastering old video is probably one of the more benign uses of AI, specifically when it comes to upscaling. It uses the technology’s pattern duplication to simply guess what an image was supposed to look like and generates it automatically. It likely won’t ever be as good as a human’s guess, but it can be a reasonable shortcut. Companies (as well as fans) in charge of remastering old games and movies have used it, but often, they touch up the AI’s output by hand to ensure consistency and accuracy; it’s clear that Engine Software didn’t do this.

I sort of noticed this in the original article. If you look at the fingers of the Handsomemen, you’ll see telltale inconsistencies. Some fingers are fat, others are mashed together. Nothing you’d necessarily notice at first glance, though your brain might pick it up. More often than not, I give the benefit of the doubt, but I should have probably listened to my doubts on this one.

For the introduction cutscene and some of the ones in Ulmeyda, it’s much like this; the inconsistencies are ugly but small. In particular, the AI didn’t know how to deal with the depth of field blurring in a lot of the scenes, so sometimes you get stripes of blur in a way that doesn’t make any sense. It doesn’t know what a telephone pole looks like, so it set up a bunch of crosses. If we’re being super charitable, it’s ugly, but you could maybe look past it.

Then you hit the chapter with the Handsomemen and things come undone pretty quickly. An early news program turns abstract. ZTT Comics becomes ZK Comics at the same time a character mentions their proper name. It can’t keep line weight consistent at the best of times. But my favorite moment is the inked comic version of Dan Smith. It couldn’t differentiate elements in the shading on his face, so it guessed wrong on what was supposed to be his mouth and smudged everything together. It looks like he’s wearing a Shyguy mask. Forget that it doesn’t know what hatching is. That is something you just can’t miss. Later, it shows the titular assassin group standing in a row and it can’t figure out where one ends and another begins, so they’re all wadded up.

The cutscene changes has resulted in the game being review-bombed on Steam. As I said, AI upscaling is a pretty benign use of insidious technology, but the problem here is that the “remastered” cutscenes look like shit. Even at the best of times when things aren’t moving much, the robot’s struggle to keep everything consistent is pretty obvious. It barely skirts the line of “better than nothing” before eventually descending into “please step away from my child.”

If the original masters of these cutscenes still existed, it would 100% be better if those were used instead, but that’s not always an option. I assume that Engine Software only had the 480p originals pulled from the GameCube version, so this sort of upscaling would be one of the only cost-effective ways to approach it. But even then, they should have touched things up by hand. There isn’t a tonne of movement in the Killer7 animated cutscenes, so it doesn’t seem as though it would be an unreasonably labor-intensive process. It would be nice to see some respect for the audience and the game being worked on instead of just having something shit out for a change.