Your Picture Is Now Garbage and Nobody Will Say Why

I want to start by saying something about Push Square, and I want to say it before I even get to what they're reporting, because the site itself is the crime scene here just as much as the AI filter is. "Push Square." What is that. Push a square. Push it where. I have pushed exactly one square in my life and that was a floor tile in the Rexall on Cutlass Avenue that was loose for eleven years and everybody in town knew to step around it except the Hendricksons, who were new, and who I believe moved away specifically because of that tile, though nobody ever confirmed this and I never asked. Anyway. A website named after that kind of confusion is reporting to me, breathlessly, that a leaked artificial intelligence filter — for something called DLSS 5, which sounds like a parking garage level and not a piece of technology anyone should trust — has been slapped onto major PlayStation 5 games and is now causing what they themselves, in their own quoted words, call "disturbing" visual distortions. Their words. Not mine. I'm just the fella reading it out loud, agitated, on a Tuesday.

And here is where I have to stop and tell you about the arcade, because the arcade is where this all traces back to, not logically, just — atmospherically. There was a Aladdin's Castle in the mall by the Sears, and the specific hum of that place, a hum you could feel in your fillings, came from forty-some cabinets all running their own dedicated board, their own dedicated chip, nothing shared, nothing patched overnight by a company in another state while you slept. You put your quarter in — and it was a quarter, a real quarter, weighing what a quarter weighs, not some coin economy inside an app — and the picture that came up was the picture that was going to come up. Every time. Forever. Centipede did not wake up one morning with a "leaked AI filter" making the mushrooms look like wet cardboard. Centipede respected you. And I bring this up not because it has anything to do with a PlayStation 5, which I want to be clear I have never held, but because the *respect* is the thing that's missing, and once I start pulling on the thread of respect I find myself back at that mall food court and I honestly cannot tell you how I got there from a headline about a filter.

Now. The article. Let me actually get to the article, because I promised myself I would this time and then the Aladdin's Castle thing happened, which — fine, that's how it goes, that's how it's always gone with me, my late uncle used to say I could get lost walking to the mailbox and he wasn't wrong, God rest him, or maybe he's not dead, I genuinely am not sure at this point, we lost touch over a disagreement about a fence. So: DLSS 5. Somebody, somewhere, without authorization apparently, got hold of a filter meant to do something — upscale, sharpen, I don't fully grasp the plumbing of it and I don't need to, because the *result*, per the people who play these games and looked at the screen with their own two eyes, is bad. Distorted. Ugly in a way that unsettled them enough to put the word "disturbing" in a headline, and headline writers do not reach for "disturbing" lightly, not even at a website called Push Square, not even now, in this degraded era where every word has been used up twice.

Here's my actual position, and I want to be honest that I don't fully know where it's going to land until I get there, which is how I prefer to do things. It is not that artificial intelligence is bad. I refuse to be the fella who just says technology bad, old thing good, because that is the laziest chair in the room and I see plenty of people falling into it and I will not join them, even though — look, I'll admit the impulse is there, it's always there, but I catch it. My actual position is narrower and stranger than that: it's that somebody's *game*, a thing another human sat and rendered frame by frame, texture by texture, got run through a filter that leaked, meaning it wasn't even supposed to be out, wasn't approved, wasn't signed off by whoever spent the years making the original picture look the way it was supposed to look — and now the *look itself*, the actual artistic decision, has been overwritten by something that escaped a lab. Nobody voted on this. Nobody at Sony sent me a letter. The picture on the television is not the picture that was promised, and I don't care if the technology underneath is clever, the promise is the thing, the promise is the whole thing, and once the promise breaks you're not looking at a game anymore, you're looking at a rumor of a game.

Which brings me — and I apologize in advance, this one really doesn't connect, I want to flag that up front so you're not sitting there waiting for the turn, there is no turn — to the summer the Kowalczyk boy, or it might've been Kowalski, there were two different families and I have genuinely never in forty years sorted out which one had the pool, but one of them had an above-ground pool, and the liner started to bulge on one side, just a slow bulge, week over week, and his father — big man, forearms like a dockworker, worked at the plant, the good plant, not the one that closed — refused to drain it, insisted it would "settle," and it did not settle, it got worse, and by August the whole family was swimming at a forty-degree tilt like the pool itself had an opinion about the neighborhood, and neighborhood kids would come by just to watch people swim uphill, and there was a rumor — never substantiated, I want to be clear, I am not repeating this as fact — that the reason for the bulge was a tree root, or possibly a dispute with the Hendricksons about drainage easement, the same Hendricksons from the Rexall tile, small town, everything loops back, and the pool stood tilted like that for two more summers before somebody's uncle, not mine, a different uncle entirely, came with a truck and hauled the whole rig away in an afternoon, and nobody ever told me what happened to the water. I think about that pool more than is reasonable. I don't know why I thought about it just now. I really don't.

Where was I. The filter. Right, and another thing — and this is a real "and another thing," I am formally opening a grievance here and I want it on the record even though I know I will not resolve it — nobody asked the *artists*. Whoever painted the light on those PS5 games, whoever decided a puddle should catch the sun a certain way, that person is not in this article, that person has no name, that person is a ghost in the machine of their own work, and meanwhile a filter with a version number gets to walk in and redecorate the house without so much as a knock. I don't know who to be angry at for this and that is precisely the kind of thing that keeps me up. Is it the leaker? Is it whoever built the filter and left the door unlocked? Is it Push Square, frankly, for the tone, for putting "dogsh*t" — a word I am not going to fully print because my mother, deceased, or possibly just not speaking to me, I forget the current status, raised me better than that — right there in a headline like that's journalism now? I don't have an answer. I am simply going to leave that hanging there, agitated, unresolved, the way most things in my life get left.

And speaking of things left unresolved, the bus. I have to tell you about the 14 bus, the one that went past the hardware store and then did the long loop by the quarry before coming back around, and the driver — I want to say Delbert, could've been Delmore, big ears, you know the one, everybody knew the one — used to let you ride the whole loop twice for one fare if you just stayed on and didn't make a fuss, and one winter the heater broke and instead of fixing it he just handed out a stack of moving blankets he apparently kept for exactly this purpose, like he'd been planning for the heater to break since the day he got the route, and the whole bus rode in silence under moving blankets like a funeral procession that had taken a wrong turn into public transit, and somebody — not me, I want to be extremely clear it was not me — started humming something, and by the second loop past the quarry half the bus was humming it, nobody knew the words, I still don't know the words, I couldn't tell you the tune if you asked me right now, and then the heater got fixed the next week and nobody ever spoke of it again, the blankets vanished, Delbert or Delmore retired sometime after, I heard he moved to be near a daughter, or maybe it was a sister, and that was that, the whole thing just closed up like it never happened, no ceremony, no filter leaked into it, it simply *was*, once, and then it wasn't, and the picture never distorted because there was no picture, just a bus, in the cold, humming.

I don't trust anything that gets patched after the fact. That's the whole column, if I'm being honest, that's the load-bearing beam under all of this rambling: a thing should look, on the day you receive it, like the thing you were promised, and if some invisible authority can reach into your television at 2 a.m. and change the picture without your say-so, then I don't know what you actually own anymore, and I don't think Push Square knows either, they're too busy workshopping headlines with words in them my mother wouldn't allow. And another thing — the Hendricksons. I never did find out what happened with that easement. Somebody ought to look into it.

— Edgar