I'll just add one more as a happy customer who would never upload personal photos to some AI service: ACDSee [0] has local AI tagging and super resolution upscaling without any associated cloud services or subscriptions, it's just a one time purchase lifetime license - basically a lightroom classic competitor.
ACDSee - wow, it's been a while since I saw this name!
For the not familiar: it's been one of better photo viewer apps on Windows in early 2000s. At some point I learnt about IrfanView though and moved to it. (And then moved to MacOS).
I especially like the batch operations, for when I want to do stuff with format conversions, resizing, EXIF data and other things. Really pleasant software.
I used IrfanView before then, it was honestly great for Windows. It was mentioned in the parent comment, here's their page, too: https://www.irfanview.com/
But my use cases have been regular image operations, never really the fancy AI stuff, no idea what the software landscape there is like (have to mention, given the topic).
It's important to remember that these upscalers will hallucinate new content. Especially when law enforcement tries to use these to find suspects from blurry photos. See this example from the lower left of their front-page demo where it adds a person to the boat: https://imgur.com/a/Vo3zlO3
I'm thinking the right way of doing it is to embed in a viewer. So that the original stays untouched but visible quality gets better with new technologies.
Maybe they're cranking out AI SaaS products to see what sticks. I was going to say low effort, but it's not zero effort and does offer some kind of service. I could have used some AI help for my kitchen design, I hated the process.
This looks pretty good! Results of roughly this caliber are already really common with local, and freely usable tools and models though. Picking one randomly: https://github.com/jtscmw01/ComfyUI-DiffBIR
The Reddit StableDiffusion and related groups have a ton of upscaling workflows that use diffusion models, GANS and the like to dream up the additional pixels for extreme zoom-and-enhance use cases.
Honestly, this is the first time I've seen "hallucinate" used usefully and properly. I get that putting legal teeth on this idea is difficult and fraught with pitfalls, but I believe the benefit outweighs the risk.
Similar to, but more useful than, when food producers lobby for fake versions of their food to be labelled as such, and to perhaps not have that name.
to be fair, every government of a reasonably prosperous country is trying to figure out how to control the potential AI economy.
if not legally, we should at least as a community remind people that it's basically making up the details. personally I look forward to seeing it used in court and completely tanking a case or two. that should draw some attention to the danger.
https://huggingface.co/fal/AuraSR
https://upscayl.org/
https://www.topazlabs.com/gigapixel
https://skylum.com/luminar/upscale-ai
https://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop-lightroom/super-res...
https://www.upscale.media/
https://ai.nero.com/image-upscaler
https://imgupscaler.com/
etc.