Three Experiences with Video and AI

Finding an Old TV Episode

I recently found myself wondering about a TV episode I saw decades ago. I had only the haziest memory of it, so I threw this at Gemini:

I'm looking for an episode from the original TV show The Outer Limits or The Twilight Zone. The story is about a man with a robotic hand that he has to add fingers to in order to increase its ability to help him figure out what is happening. Do you know this episode? 

Gemini did, correctly identifying it as "Demon with a Glass Hand" from the 1960s series, The Outer Limits. Googling for that yielded a link to the episode at The Internet Archive, which I downloaded and added to my Plex server. 

Less than 15 minutes elapsed between the time I thought about the episode and the time I had it in my video library. It's not the best television content in the world, but I marvel at how easily I was able to track down and watch a show from 60 years ago based on only a very sketchy memory.

Upscaling the Episode

"Demon with a Glass Hand" isn't terribly compelling, but that doesn't mean it shouldn't look good. Unfortunately, 1963 TV was SD, and these days we're used to a lot better resolution than the 496 x 368 I got from the Internet Archive. 

Earlier this year, I purchased a copy of VideoProc Converter AI to experiment with upscaling low-resolution 8mm family videos I'd had digitized. The results were impressive on everything except faces, which the upscaling process tended to turn into grotesque caricatures of the people behind them. But hope springs eternal, so I decided to see what VideoProc could do with "Demon with a Glass Hand." 

Invoking the program yielded a message excitedly telling me that a new version was, you know, faster and better, and I should upgrade immediately. It was free, so I did, but I didn't expect that V3 would be noticeably better than V2. When was the last time a program upgrade lived up to its PR?

In this case, I think it does. Check it out:

Upscaling is an interesting challenge, because it involves fabricating information (pixels) not present in the original images. Simple interpolation doesn't do a very good job, and VideoProc's V2 AI-based approach fell apart on faces. V3's faces aren't perfect, but I think they're good enough for casual viewing, and that's an impressive accomplishment.

Looking Forward

A few days ago, Andrei Alexandrescu brought my attention to this reddit post featuring a synthesized video by Ari Kuschnir using Google's Veo. The clip takes advantage of Veo's new ability to generate audio tracks, including dialogue and singing. I find the clip pretty amazing. There are legitimate questions about how Veo was trained and how its output could be used for ill, but I prefer to focus on the technical progress it represents and the creative promise it offers. 

Incongruously, I was reminded of the Veo demo after viewing another old TV episode I barely remembered, one Gemini identified from this prompt:

I'm now thinking of a different episode, again from The Twilight Zone or The Outer Limits. It involves a man who goes to a store to custom-order a woman. He chooses eye color, etc. Any idea which episode this is?

Again Gemini knew what I was looking for ("I Sing the Body Electric" from the original The Twilight Zone), Google found a downloadable link to it, and I had it on my Plex only a few minutes after issuing the query. 

The episode is quite terrible (much worse than "Demon with a Glass Hand"), but I liked the hopeful ending. Not the part summarizing grandma's data collection and sharing policy ("Everything you ever said or did, everything you ever laughed or cried about, I'll share with the other machines"), but the optimistic sentiment behind Rod Serling's closing voiceover:

Who's to say at some distant moment, there might be an assembly line producing a gentle product in the form of a grandmother, whose stock in trade is love?

For countries with an aging population requiring increasingly attentive personal care, I'd expect that gentle, loving robots rolling off an assembly line could be a pretty attractive prospect.