Have you ever wondered what some of your favourite video game characters, like Mario and Link from The Legend Of Zelda, would look like in real life? Of course you have, everyone has.
Anyway, some insane genius has decided to answer that question by building a special face depixeliser tool and the results are more than a little cooked.
Speaking of video game characters inching closer to real life, the GOAT team talk about the PS5 and what to expect from Sony’s powerhouse console on ‘It’s Been A Big Day For…’ below:
Russian developer Denis Mallmonov created this AI face depixeliser app, which can take a super pixelated low-resolution photo and reconstruct it into a high-quality portrait of what the AI thinks the photo should look like.
It sounds great on paper but in practice, well, it’s more than a bit creepy.
That’s because people decided to test the face depixeliser using super pixelated images of their favourite video game characters and the real-life result spat out by the AI is pure nightmare fuel since the app wasn’t built to handle fictional creations.
Initially the results weren’t too bad, like this reconstruction of B.J Blazkowicz from the Wolfenstein series:
But things quickly went off the rails as the face pixeliser had trouble reconstructing a real-life Doomguy from the Doom games:
Characters like Mario, Link, the Minecraft dude and even a Cacodemon from Doom were put through the app and, uh, the results were pure nightmare fuel.
What’s even worse than completely ruining everyone’s favourite video game character, the app couldn’t even properly reconstruct real-life people, especially those what are black like Barack Obama.
People probably thought the app could recreate old-school characters into realistic looking people akin to those found in The Last Of Us Part II. But what we got were horrific Sonic The Hedgehog-eqsue creations instead, as well proof that the app is flawed and perhaps a little bit racist.
In the slightly paraphrased words of a certain Jurassic Park character: You were so preoccupied with whether or not you could, you didn’t stop to think if you should.
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