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PaperclipPerfector  11hr ago (text post)   1455 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 8, 2025

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I think you overestimate the attention to detail people have. There's a bluesky thread here full of mistakes in AI-generated captions on anime from Crunchyroll. I cannot believe a human fluent in English read all of these along the lines they are supposed to caption and signed off on them. You would think a very simple and fundamental step in review would be "and then a human reads the caption alongside the line it's captioning" but no! Clearly not!

To take another example, in a legal filing by Anthropic their AI messed up a citation to a journal article. The AI got the journal, page number, and link all correct but got the title and authors wrong. The attorney's declaration was very clear that if you went to the link the citation provided it was the correct article (with correct title and authors). You might think a step in verifying an AI generated citation includes "do the cited title and authors match the actual ones" but, again, apparently not!

Given the rank incompetence with which companies deploy AI I am happy to believe HBO just put the un-edited originals in some AI upscaler and hit publish on the result, without any human sitting down and watching it all the way through.

Given the rank incompetence with which companies deploy AI I am happy to believe HBO just put the un-edited originals in some AI upscaler

That can't have been what happened, because the vomit hose guys weren't visible in the original 1080p episode. Ergo, one of two things must have happened:

  1. They redeveloped the footage from the original negative but at a higher resolution, then reconstructed the episode from scratch in a NLE.
  2. As above, but rather than redeveloping the footage from the original negative, they took the original digital video files which were created from the original negatives, upscaled those (perhaps using AI upscaling), then reconstructed the episode from scratch in an NLE.

If they'd upscaled the original video using an AI upscaling tool, you would've doubtless seen some weird upscaling artefacts and weird colour correction — but if the hose guys weren't visible in the input file, they wouldn't have been visible in the output file. An AI upscaling algorithm will invent visual artefacts, but it's not going to spontaneously hallucinate crew members standing behind the actors.

I intended to convey something like (2), appreciate the clarification.

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