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Comment by lmilcin | Hacker News Reader

No, it does not provide sci-fi abilities to "enhance" resolution end extract new details.

Because those details are generated by AI.

For example, the woman in the photo might have different teeth in reality. We can't learn anything about her teeth because the teeth in the generated photo are one of many possible solutions that match the input.

Actually, the photo now has less information for practical purpose as you don't know which details are real and which have been manufactured.

So about the only gain is to improve the photo for aesthetic reasons.

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I disagree. If you need to know an estimate or guess of certain details that aren't visible in lo-res, this is very useful because the AI is likely much better at inferring these details than a human.

Sure, it is still a guess but a better one than humans can make.

You said it: estimate

It knows people have teeth, but the teeth are only estimated, not real teeth. Maybe they have been copied from some other face. The point is, it is not her teeth.

Imagine it was low res car photo with unreadable plates. "Enhancing" them this way would not bring back the plates. It could paste some plates, because we know this part of car usually has plates, but the real information (actual registration number) is already lost and can't be brought back this way.

how do you know the registration number is actually lost? Surely if it's downscaled enough it will be lost, but there's probably a point at which the data is not lost to AI, yet unrecoverable for humans.

I see you don't understand. Either it is or it is not lost. By lost I mean unrecoverable with any method because there is not enough information to recover from.

In any photo some detail has been lost. This is trivially proven, as the amount of detail in the actual scene was many, many orders of magnitude more than in the photo file.

Detail that has been lost cannot be recovered, it can only be replaced with something that makes contextual sense which is what AI is doing here.

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