[DiogenesKynikos]

The PICO images do look more realistic at first glance, but when you zoom in, it turns out that PICO has changed all sorts of small details in the images.

For example, if you zoom in on the trees in the first image, PICO has moved branches around and invented new branches that didn't exist. It does so in a way that looks very realistic, but it is still altering reality. The JPEG failure mode is much different: it causes ringing artifacts that are obviously artificial, but it doesn't move a branch from location A to location B.

[akersten]

And the most critical thing about JPG is that the decoding is deterministic. Who's to say this fancy new PICO thing doesn't produce different pixels in a year when the algorithm improves, or the local model changes, etc.

Imo, generative AI and its derivatives should be completely shunned as image/video encoders. They are simply an inappropriate tool for the job. And I say that as an AIpilled token addict.

It would be like saying hey check out my amazing new text compression algorithm, 97x better than LZMA, then you look at the encoded file and it says "generate a romance story between two characters named Romeo and Juliet"