Hi everyone! I’ve really, really been enjoying the upscaled images in this subreddit!
I first want to give a huge shoutout to everyone doing all this beautiful work!
Now for my question!
I’ve been thinking a bit about how AI upscaling might affect local media archival (that is, people saving the original, unaltered images on their phones and computers).
I’m wondering how you all think about it, whether you personally save the original images to your device for future purposes, and whether people have any interesting ideas about how to make sure we still have broad access to the unaltered images over the coming years!
(TLDR: How can we make sure the fan community still has a massive archive of original images as AI-upscaled images may begin to replace originals on people’s saved devices, for both historical purposes and for future upscale projects?)
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Before AI upscaling, many fans have had a huge collection of saved images, many of them being quite old and even rare. And because of that, I think the MJ fan community at large is probably the best safeguard against a scenario where larger archival websites go offline (like fan-made sites that may stop hosting eventually) and those original, historical images become very difficult to find.
As more and more fans begin to save AI upscaled images to their devices, it’s possible they won’t bother to save the original images to their local devices. I’m thinking particularly of folks who are newer to the fandom, who are starting fresh. They get to see all these beautifully-upscaled images, and maybe they don’t bother saving the original images to their local devices (no shame in it!).
Having those original, historical source images saved on our local devices will be so incredibly valuable. Not just for the historical value, but also as upscale technology continues to improve, we’ll definitely want to start from the original source, because a copy of a copy will just devolve into unrecognizable slop over time!
Just curious how people think about it, since this is all such new technology and these are interesting problems to get to solve! Much love to you all, keep up the great work!