The problem with AI-upscaled monstrosities isn't the AI

But 28 Days Later just got a 4K release this year, which Boyle personally approved. He might have been Lucas’d in the past, but he wasn’t this time. “The good news is it looks like shit,” a review states on the 4K Blu-Ray subreddit. The reviewer wasn’t being facetious, just expressing relief, because 28 Days Later didn’t get Lucas’d in the upscaling process. There is no AI upscaling. No sharpening. Just a terrific horror film looking as good as it can, given the technical limitations. 

Sony produced the upscaled version and it’s a masterclass in restraint and craftsmanship. It is also a rarity in Hollywood, where upscaling is generally being done by two types of people. One is like Sony or the Star Trek nerds: wielding AI tools as meticulously as an artist. This type is extremely rare. The other kind has a job to do as quickly and cheaply as possible. Quality and final product take a backseat to meeting quotas. That is who seems to be doing most of the upscaling work in Hollywood right now. There are thousands of TV shows and movies to be upscaled, which translates in executive speak to millions of hours of content to be monetized. Most of that upscaling isn’t for the boutique Blu-Ray market, where people might drop $80 for a quality transfer of movies. It’s happening at the streaming services that need more offerings to boost subscribers.

My particular favorite (in a bad way) subset of this form of upscaling is what’s happening to old TV shows. Like 28 Days Later, there are limitations to what upscaling can accomplish. Many TV shows were only preserved on tape, which degrades over time and wasn’t exactly pristine to begin with. That’s led to a lot of bad upscaling like the ghostly faces that emerged in an episode of The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour. In 2024, Paramount got some rave reviews for the release of a massive boxset for I Love Lucy fans that included upscaled content sourced from original 35mm negatives, 16mm reels, and tape. It was promptly ruined by the AI creating sharp and eerie-looking new people from blurry background actors.

A Different World got hit too. And Roseanne. 

They’re all older shows—syndication darlings that have been reliable money makers for broadcast TV for decades. They could have been remastered like 28 Days Later or carefully upscaled like Deep Space Nine. Instead they were churned out. It wasn’t the AI that was the problem, it was the studios and distributors who looked at it before release and said “Yeah, that looks good enough.” Like Cameron, they might have just been Lucas’d. Hollywood has this near-obsessive need right now to mimic the tech business world, including its absurd passion for AI. It’s a natural response to the Big Tech invasion. They can’t beat them so they either get acquired by them or become them. Yet what has always differentiated Hollywood from Silicon Valley is the ostensible care for the craft. Hollywood has made money and been the center of power in media for decades, but it’s also made art using every tool at its disposal. 

But tools cannot compensate for apathy or mediocrity. That’s the core of the struggle in Hollywood right now. Not Big Tech and their big tech tools, but Hollywood’s own need to do things as fast and cheap as possible. It’s not just John Goodman or Lucille Ball or Cree Summer getting AI’d into waxen puddy when you watch their old sitcoms upscaled on streaming. The tools are already being used elsewhere—for title cards on shows at Disney+ and HBO Max and by set designers for background art in Emmy-winning franchises. Hell, most of the de-aging in feature films over the last decade has used AI in some way. The tools are powerful. It’s the people that can be the problem.