Not Even DLSS 5 Could "Beautify" Nvidia Right Now.

 

Woof.

I tried to start this one a few different times over the last few months, increasingly as time went on. Even over the last 24 hours I’ve tried to land on an approach that really tackles the heart of my concern. This is an overwrought, complex issue that must be detailed with great care. The issue is not DLSS 5, the technology is symptomatic of a much greater issue: Nvidia. 

(Please keep in mind, this is ultimately an informed opinion piece, you’re technically free to disagree, but I’ve done my homework).

It should be widely known by now that I am no fan of corporate juggernauts, they do more harm than good with no exceptions, for however much good they contribute to any single sector, they are masking their sometimes outright comically nefarious activities. As the new “Biggest Company In The History of Everything Ever, no seriously, they’re bigger than Microsoft and Apple and Google and Amazon”, Nvidia is also similarly responsible for its share of negative side effects, and to be completely honest; DLSS 5 is probably the single most boring problem. However, due to its current relevance, that’s where we’re going to start.

A few days ago, Nvidia unveiled DLSS 5 to divisive and controversial reception, while *ahem* certain groups saw it as a fantastic upgrade to modern rendering software and nothing more than the next natural evolution of AI-supported Super Sampling technology, many groups rebuked it as a half baked, shameless attempt at suggesting that all games needed to look better was lazy “yassification”, seemingly influenced by the same technology that builds “AI Girlfriends”. I’ve attached a comparison below that includes Resident Evil 9’s protagonist, Grace Ashcroft, before and after DLSS 5 employment.

These two instances, simply, do not look the same, whatsoever. There are arguments made that the model itself has not been altered, and that seemingly is the case. However, that does not mean that the artistic integrity of the design itself has not been impacted. I find it shocking that in an internet landscape littered with newly self appointed critics, that they all now suddenly cannot formulate the sentence: “yeah, color grading *does* change everything”. We just got over people complaining about Marathon’s lighting, we aren’t even done with people acting like Marvel movies are all gray, but somehow no one wants to point out that lighting and color grading have turned an FBI agent into “AI generated femme fatale that pops up between torrent downloads, also, I don’t have an ad blocker for some inexplicable reason”.

Nvidia was “kind” enough to share multiple examples of this technology utterly brutalizing art direction, however I think Ashcroft poses a uniquely interesting issue. If you have interacted meaningfully with me before, this next point should not come as a surprise; this is misogyny.

The idea that the “improvements” toward’s Grace’s model are rooted in more defined features (including, but not limited to: lighter hair, fuller and redder lips, smoky eye shadow instead of exhaustion-influenced dark circles, a sharper jawline and higher cheek bones), suggests that improvements to a woman’s presentation are rooted in materialism, that “beautification” is a necessary improvement, the largest issue being that a woman’s facial features need to be improved at all and paraded around as a technical demonstration. This is misogyny. The counter argument, of course, is “well they also did it to Leon Kennedy”. Dear Back of The Class, misogyny and all social prejudice are rooted in historical context, men have never had to “smile” or “look pretty” to be taken seriously, but you’ll find about 30 years of video game history that confirms that the way a woman looks is, in part, integral to a game’s marketability, (e.g. Tomb Raider). For what it’s worth, I legitimately could not care less, but that doesn’t erase the ceaseless and well-documented chirping from people who swore that RE9 was “woke nonsense”, or people that (are vocally) sexually attracted to the 10-polygon version of Lara Croft over her 2013 iteration, simply because they can superimpose whatever HD realization they have in their minds onto what’s now, essentially, a blank template. In short, there are people who genuinely deliberate whether or not 1996 Lara Croft is “hotter” than 2013 Lara Croft, and my only question about that is whether or not any other facet of those games were enjoyed by these people, or if their sole purpose of engagement with any of these titles is whether they can fantasize about polygons. Play the fucking game.

A side note, I feel the need to address a possible tiny elephant in the room, I am a man and discussions about misogyny are not and should not be mine to spearhead, I am also at risk of misrepresentations given this fact. However, I must insist that at the very least, I can and should vocalize how existentially tired I am of the first 5 comments on a game reveal’s trailer being whether or not a character is goonable and how that’ll translate into sales. Get control of your fucking life and knock this shit off. 

Everyone likes pretty characters, they are meant to be idyllic in their own respective right. However, it’s what that pretty is, and who decides the boundaries for that subjective note. “Vanilla” Grace Ashcroft is pretty, she just happens to be a tired and terrified FBI agent. Nvidia is deciding that an “improvement” is to further influence designs by gearing them into “AI Slop” territory. I am not opposed to diving into how lighting calibration itself can be prejudiced, but that is a conversation for a different time. Please be aware, it can be (see: Shirley Cards).

The TL;DR of this section is that Nvidia is very clearly choosing to allow their AI infrastructure to influence the way in which these improvements happen. Anyone remotely fluent in this subject matter will tell you that AI models are built on a few principle data pools, some of the most important are:

Training datasets.

Optimization targets.

Human feedback loops.

These 3 fields are all subjective and influenced by real people who have preconceptions and biases, and given the 3rd field, consider the “humans” that normally offer their “feedback” on this sort of technology, and what that feedback probably is.

DLSS 5 is problematic. It doesn’t change models, but it is not simply “the lighting’s a little better”. Which brings me to my final caveat of DLSS 5 before I move onto the larger issues with Nvidia; it is normalization.

It has become blatantly obvious that the mass proliferation of AI in consumer spaces is almost exclusively due to Nvidia’s stock’s dependence on mass adoption in any shape or form. “Just use a little LLM on your essay”, “use a little in your game”, “use a little in your movies”, “ask it for health advice”, “just use it everyone”. This nullifies the argument that DLSS 5 is “just another iteration”, because what this does is normalize the adoption of art that has an “AI Slop” aesthetic. There are so many people with Ghibli PFPs, even people that allegedly oppose AI. I must tell you that Miyazaki-San himself considers it to be a fucking abhorrence, this is another feather in his cap. If we, as players, accept that DLSS 5 is “an improvement”, the industry is going to look towards this as “the thing players want”, you will see less individuality, less risk taking in art design, and every character you see will begin to look like this, it’s flanderization, it’s inevitable unless you, as a consumer, exercise your responsibility in vocalizing that this is NOT an improvement, and is a bastardization of the art direction, and should NOT be accepted for mass adoption.

Don’t tell me it won’t happen, this sort of “we need to homogenize this sector” thing happens all the time.

Which brings me right to my next big point. Why Nvidia needs mass adoption. I don’t know if you know how market caps actually work, Nvidia does not have a giant bag with $4Tn in it, a market cap is determined by dollar-per-share value and total shares distributed. Nvidia has a lot of share holders, and their dollar-per-share value is really fucking high. The reason for this is that Nvidia has gotten itself locked into multiple government (and major conglomerate) level contracts to build their AI architecture, it’s an incredibly safe stock right now,  it helps them that their history as GPU manufacturers put them into control of a high level of wafer supply early on, and they were able to divert their resource allocation into their AI sector.

These contracts they have are highly lucrative, but only work with public sector buy-in, they need mass market engagement to continue convincing their investors to keep funneling money into their operations. They need to sell the technology to enterprises, and those enterprises need people to use it if they’re going to keep buying it from Nvidia. If no one is using it, enterprises will pull out, and Nvidia will buckle under its own debt. So they get it in your games, your movies, maybe your cereal. The most nefarious part of this is that they sprinkle it in surveillance tech, social media, and advertisements. Your life is being influenced by companies that leverage Nvidia’s architecture to gear highly specialised and bespoke content to you, your news, entertainment, and goods and services are increasingly being subjected to AI filtering, brought to you by Nvidia. I don’t want to get into it, but Nvidia is critically aware of how their technology is being employed for military and policing purposes. However, they are protected from the potential consequences because Western investors require the success of AI as global powers attempt to benefit from the next gold rush that may never come, the collapse of the AI bubble would be an economic catastrophe of unprecedented proportions, but it’s a house built on toothpicks to begin with, it’s all but guaranteed.

So, to save themselves from imminent collapse, they need to convince you and your neighbor (and everyone else) that a little AI is fine, whether it’s a little lighting generation, an image here and there, or a whole movie; because when you accept that “a little is fine”, “a lot” seems increasingly reasonable. So if Grace Ashcroft doesn’t look like a problem, neither does the picture of your fake girlfriend or your 10-years-deceased grandmother on this year’s Christmas cards, it’s all normal now. It’s all fine. This is not conspiracy, it’s well documented market performance that is cyclical in nature. The same way the internet bubble went around is the same way that Ubisoft tried to convince you that in-game NFTs were “the next big thing”, is the same way that Meta tried to convince you that “Metaverse” was “the next big thing” before it bottomed out on its ass; it’s all the same thing. They want you to be okay with using this fucking garbage so they sneak it into your lunch and make excuses as to why it’s not actually problematic. It is. Please do not convince yourself that the underhanded proliferation of AI is not problematic.

“Why is it problematic?” You might be asking. Aside from the fact that AI has already begun to influence foreign drone strikes and political policy, there’s the obvious consequence of environmental damage. The strawman you’ll see passed around is “nuh uh, that’s now how it works” or, worse, “so what? that’s capitalism baybeeee”. Both of these are right, but both of these are problematic. A lot of people think that AI destroys “drinkable water”; this is not true. AI data centers need a few things to function and scale at the rates they currently do:

1. Freshwater

2. Fossil Fuels

3. Minerals

4. Land

The first point goes to the need for data centers to have constant water cooling for operation, it consumes billions of gallons of freshwater that could otherwise be used to support regions facing freshwater stress, whether it be for agriculture or other purposes. It seizes freshwater, which comprises less than 5% of the world’s water supply. You cannot throw the fucking pacific ocean on crops, and you cannot throw it into a cooling system, salt water would destroy both, but the AI bubble’s investors have decided that Ghibli PFPs are more important than fresh food.

Fossil fuels, I’m not getting into it, you’ve been told for decades why the use of fossil fuels is problematic; ozone, contamination, fracking, etc. If you do not understand why rapid use of fossil fuels is an increasing issue I refuse to believe that you made it this far into the blog post without telling me to kill myself in a direct message.

Minerals, now this one is interesting. Recently we launched an incursion into Venezuela, and while the stated reason was to remove Maduro from power, various government officials had let slip an important interest: Venezuela is full of fossil fuel reserves and potentially a very resource rich territory, the resources in question are expected to be rare earth metals, which are used in GPU production. More GPU demand, more earth metals demand, more foreign incursion, largely so that the AI bubble can be continuously upheld and expanded.

These expansions exist, physically, there are new data centers cropping up every day. These data centers contaminate the areas that they find themselves in and you may be shocked to find out that many of these data centers are constructed in low income communities that already have enough trouble with access to healthcare: it is destroying whatever ecology they have left and stands to potentially affect their health and quality of life.

But Grace looks better lmao so that’s cool or whatever, go off king.

This is a problem. This is a problem that I refuse to reduce to “you guys just don’t understand the way DLSS 5 works”. No. YOU do not understand how Nvidia is working, what it’s doing, and what its investor’s aspirations are, and who those aspirations come at the expense of. It’s YOU. YOU will bear the inevitable consequences of accepting the normalization and mass adoption of AI. 

GO WATCH WALL-E.

DLSS 5 Grace isn’t ugly because she looks like AI Slop now (she does), she’s ugly because of what the change represents. We need to stop accepting change being forced upon us simply because “capitalism”; the rate at which AI specifically is expanding, is killing you. Please stop making excuses for, or waving off, the little things; it is literally the little things that kill you.