Netflix brought back A Different World of AI-upscaled nightmare fuel

[Karlston]

Nothing ruins nostalgia like mangled text and melting faces.

Image: Carsey-Werner Company

 

Thanks to AI upscaling technology, the version of A Different World that’s currently on Netflix won’t look how you remember it did when it aired. And not in a good way. The “HD” remaster of the 1980s sitcom being streamed is a nightmarish mess of distorted faces, garbled text, and misshapen backgrounds.

 

People started spotting the issues shortly after Netflix added the Cosby Show spin-off to its service in February, with criticisms of the botched upscaling effort appearing across online social platforms. While the type of upscaling techniques used to remaster the original 480p or 360p broadcast resolution haven’t been officially revealed, all signs — including the illegible text and bizarrely malformed hands — currently point to sloppy AI.

 

“You can make one blurry pixel into four pixels, or four pixels into sixteen pixels but you gotta have that information come from somewhere,” developer Scott Hanselman said on TikTok. “From far away, it looks amazing, and you now have a 4K, remastered version of A Different World, which I think we can all agree would be amazing. The problem is AI upscaling image technology isn’t quite there yet.”

 

A Different World was previously available to stream on Max and Prime Video, which both support the show’s original 4:3 format, before coming to Netflix where it’s now cropped to 16:9. These AI upscaling issues haven’t arisen for the show on other platforms before, but Netflix itself may not have been responsible. As noted by Gizmodo, the licensing rights to A Different World are held by the Carsey-Werner production company, which also owns Roseanne — another 1980s sitcom that’s similarly blighted with ugly AI upscaling on Peacock.

 

We’ve reached out to Netflix and Carsey-Werner to clarify the upscaling problems and will update if we hear back.

 

Netflix isn’t completely absolved from blame even if it didn’t upscale A Different World. It’s difficult to understand how these issues made it past reviews or quality control checks to land in front of viewers’ eyeballs in the show’s current state. This comes as Netflix is also currently under fire for using AI to reproduce the voice of murdered influencer Gabby Petito, and was called out last year for broadcasting a true crime documentary that contained AI-generated images.

 

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