Nvidia’s new AI tool gives female game characters a new face – and gamers are fighting back

Last week, leading chipmaker Nvidia announced DLSS-5 (Deep Learning Super Sampling), a new artificial intelligence (AI) rendering tool that it calls a “breakthrough in visual fidelity for games.” The software takes low-resolution images and upscales them using AI, adding what Nvidia calls “photorealistic lighting and materials.”

The tool is intended to make video games look more photorealistic, but the examples Nvidia chose to demonstrate the technology revealed something unexpected: The AI ​​not only makes images sharper and shinier, but also makes characters significantly more conventionally attractive.

The growing backlash is about more than just makeup. This points to a broader fear about what happens when AI is given control of creative decisions – and whose idea of ​​“better” gets encoded in the algorithms.

A “beauty filter” for games?

Nvidia presented the technology using Grace Ashcroft, the protagonist of the recently released Resident Evil Requiem….