AI as a creative tool is a divisive topic, and as someone working in a creative industry, I’ll happily nail myself to the mast of ‘AI bad’. There’s no denying it can throw up some interesting stuff though, like this ‘remaster’ of Grand Theft Auto IV.
Before you get too excited/infuriated, no, someone hasn’t improved the whole of 2008 classic GTA IV by putting it through some AI tool. Rather, as far as we can wrap our heads around, someone on Reddit has run pre-recorded footage of the game through a video generation tool called Runway with a photorealistic filter.
Now, I’m no expert so I won’t try to bore you with technical explanations for everything, but my eyes work well enough to tell you it certainly has a more realistic look to it than before. It’s most convincing in nighttime scenes with wet weather, with neon lights reflecting in a life-like fashion and the lighting itself clearly a step above.
This 1:03-second video also shows daytime footage with office buildings having a mirror-like reflection on their windows – handy for a game infamous for having not many building interiors rendered. Oh, and a casual, typical GTA carjacking which we’re fairly certain you could show your nan and she’d be convinced it was real life.
Yet, not all is as glossy as it seems. We can see how janky the footage looks with pretty inconsistent framerates without having to dig that deep into it, and there’s the typical AI thing of words being a caricature of real languages rather than actually reading anything. As attentive commenters have pointed out, there’s also lots of other strange behaviour going on. People spawn inside other people, just for a start, or changing appearance halfway through an action.
Oh, and again, none of this is real-time footage – we suspect any hardware commercially available would probably shit bricks trying to run something like this in real-time.
Is it impressive for a 30-second Instagram Reel and a talking point? Sure. Are we really any closer to a world where AI can be used to remaster old games? Taking the ethics of that in the first place out of the question, and just from a technical standpoint, probably not. You can put the pitchforks down for now.
