A week ago, Nvidia set fire to its gaming reputation with a DLSS 5 announcement that made the new generative AI tech look like an AI slop filter. Now CEO Jensen Huang is still trying to do damage control and put out the blaze. Originally he called angry gamers “completely wrong” for freaking out. In a new podcast interview, however, he struck a much more diplomatic tone.
“I think their perspective makes sense and I can see where they’re coming from, because I don’t love AI slop myself,” he told Lex Fridman in a new podcast episode published on March 23. “You know, all of the AI-generated content increasingly looks similar and they’re all beautiful and so I’m empathetic towards what they’re thinking.”
But the man leading Nvidia’s AI-fueled transformation into a $4 trillion company also continued to push back on the idea that DLSS 5 is just a slop filter with no regard for the underlying visual framework and artistry that it’s using training data to remix.
Huang continued:
That’s just not what DLSS 5 is trying to do. I showed several examples of it but DLSS 5 is 3D conditioned, 3D guided. It’s ground truth structure data guided. And so the artist determined the geometry we are completely truthful to. The geometry maintains in every single frame.
It’s conditioned by the textures, the artistry of the artist. And so every single frame, it enhances but it doesn’t change anything. Now, the question is, the question about enhancing DLSS 5 also lets, because it’s, the system is open, you could train your own models to determine, and you could even in the future prompt it.
You know, ‘I want it to be a toon shader, I want it to look like this kinda,’ so you can give it even an example. And it would generate in the style of that, all consistent with the artistry, you know, the style, the intent of the artist. And so all of that is done for the artist, so that they can create something that is more beautiful, but still in the style that they want.
I think that [detractors] got the impression that the games are gonna come out the way the games are shipped the way they do, and then we’re gonna post-process it. That’s not what DLSS is intended to do. DLSS is integrated with the artist, and so it’s, it’s about giving the artist the tool of AI, the tool of generative AI. They could decide not to use it, you know?
While Nvidia has doubled down on the idea that DLSS 5 is ingrained in the artistry of how a game is presented rather than just acting as a post-processing filter, the early demo showcases make it hard to distinguish the two. What constitutes perfect graphics and who gets to decide that are precisely what’s being contested in the DLSS 5 debate.
Huang maintains that the power to decide will remain with game developers, something that was never in doubt until now.
