Okay but what if I use waifu or esrgan or anything to... Resize the picture and then put it back to the original size. Convert the picture to lab color space and then convert it to 16 bit color and then resize it and then convert it to RGB and then convert it to 8-bit and then scale it back down to the original size? What if I simply in Photoshop apply a anisotropic filter?
There are potentially a lot of things that I could do to just get around this that take literally a second.
Edit: ya know, I'll test my theories