Back in 2019 I thought AI art was just a gimmick until I tried upscaling my own sketches

I had a bunch of old pencil drawings from college sitting in a box, stuff I never bothered to scan properly. A friend suggested running them through a free AI upscaler online, just to see if the details would pop more. I figured why not, uploaded a faded sketch of a city street I did back in 2015, and the AI filled in a bunch of texture I hadn't even drawn around the brickwork. It felt weird at first, like cheating, but then I realized I still had to decide which parts to keep and which to toss out. Has anyone else used an upscaler on their traditional work and felt torn about it?

2 comments

2 Comments

val_shah7d ago

This whole thing with AI upscalers is just another version of what happens with photo editing apps. People get hung up on the tool doing the work, but they forget you still gotta be the one making the calls on what stays.

morgan.jason6d ago

Drove myself crazy last week trying to upscale some old concert photos from 2006. The AI cleaned them up nice, but then it added random details that weren't there, like wrinkles on a jacket that was definitely smooth. Had to go back and manually fix half the stuff it "fixed." So yeah @val_shah, you gotta be the one looking at every pixel and deciding what's real and what's fake. The tool is just a helper, not the boss. It's like when selfie filters used to smooth out people's noses into weird blobs. You still have to be the one looking and thinking "nope, that's wrong.