I agree. This looks fantastic. (Gaming)

by Kermit , Raleigh, NC, Sunday, March 22, 2026, 11:28 (1 hours, 44 minutes ago) @ Vortech

If you go in a Best Buy or some other place that sells TVs, the TVs will be set to showroom mode. Showroom mode, also known as store mode or demo mode, is a setting on TVs used in stores to showcase the television's features like maximum brightness and contrast. This mode is not suitable for regular home viewing as it can distort picture quality and is designed primarily for attracting customers in stores. But stores do it anyway, because people don't buy TVs based on how realistic they look, or how closely they produce the visuals in the source image. In market testing there is a HUGE preference toward TVs that were in showroom mode. Many respondents said they liked it because it seemed more natural or true to life. It makes the TV look "better" because people are initially drawn to bright lights and highly saturated colors.

A while back — at what feels like a decade ago — someone came up with Facetune. An app that bundled a suite of the most common portrait photo retouching tools together into a single focused app. This didn't break any ground, it just made tools that were buried in Photo editing apps easier to access and use. The runaway success of the app lead to many clones and competitors, all of which were trying to win marketshare and so we had a reinforcement spiral of ever more powerful features. The problem is powerful also means greater alterations from the original photo. Soon within a certain cohort, every photo de rigour was of an uncanny person who was edited closer and closer to a fairly narrow ideal of beauty, and the minimum level of acceptability is well above any living person. When people saw photos that were not edited, they thought people looked far "worse" then they do, because what was natural had been formed in an environment where everything - both professional and commercial images were all crafted to create a new different reality, and thus that became their concept of reality. Not only was this warping people understanding of the actual world, individual problems were heightened. People were dehumanized and othered because they were normal, but outside the ideal.

As tv makers had started to fulfill the desires of customers, they started looking for ways to improve TVs that people never asked for. Motion smoothing was invented. I think it's fairly well known, and I'm running out of time, so here is some background if you need it. Computers, in a broad brush changed the work of filmmakers because people who were looking at how to prompt sales in a market where the product was mature and the feature level was high

I see this new feature as another in this line of un-requested features that indiscriminately replaces the intention of artists and champions the idea of "realism" (which is rarely what the purpose of art is) while simultaneously totally shifting the very conception of reality in a directions that is harmful to society. They are doing this, not because it is intrinsically better, but because it's a new thing that they can shout about to sell something that isn't much better at doing what people had actually been asking it to do. It will probably work — as these moves have often worked in the past — for the same reason kids make themselves sick Halloween night and ERs are full of injuries on July 4th. Salt and Sugar makes food "better" but it's also fairly easy to develop a tolerance that grows ever higher until you lose perspective. Bright lights and colors biologically draw attention, but it's not the only beauty in the world.

Thanks for your thoughtful response. For the record, you're talking to someone who had a betamax machine because it was superior to VHS, chose vinyl over tapes, CDs over mp3s, and 4k discs over streaming. I care about how art is presented. I care about how reality is presented. I am someone who immediately turns off motion smoothing, and I try to calibrate my TV to more closely give me what the filmmaker intended. I don't want to overstate it. I don't pay to have my TVs calibrated, but the fact that I know you can I hope speaks to my sensitivity about these issues, and I'm not some yeehaw impressed by something shiny.

My reaction to this demo was based on whether the improvements make the image look more photorealistic, and the answer in most cases was yes. That's not everything I care about. Far from it. But I had zero emotional attachments toward the content I saw nor did I have a strong opinion about what it should look like, artistically. I think about Levi's critique of 343's addition of detail to Forerunner structures--what a smart critique it was because it depended on knowledge of what he was looking at.

I also don't spend that much time on social media, so my more limited experience with filters and AI slop did not come to mind as a comparison. I still don't think that's a completely fair comparison, and I think some of the rhetoric about this is over the top. In the new Digital Foundry video, they showed some images where someone applied DSSI 5 but adjusted the tone, and the results were good but less flashy. One of them suggested that those who produced the demo punched things up aggressively for effect. Similarly, I see YouTubers with these hyperbolic thumbnails about this and THEY'VE punched up the images dishonestly to make the difference even more dramatic.

I think reasonable people can disagree about how well DSSI 5 worked in each case, and consider pluses and minuses. I don't see it as clear cut. I think it's easy to get emotional about AI because it is a threat. I'm scared to it, and yet, it routinely impresses me. I do think we need to fight for what is human to remain, and my hope/prediction is that what is human-generated willl become more valuable to people.