Folkloric Monster Unenhanced By AI Tools

30 years ago, when the internet was just a baby, an Ozarks hunter named Frank Wall uploaded an image that he said was a photograph of the Ozark Howler.

It wasn’t a big picture. Back then, having just one or two images on a web page could make it impossible for many people to see. People used dialup internet services that used old-fashioned analog telephone lines, with data flowing at excruciatingly slow speeds.

The photograph is quite blurry. Most photography was being done using film cameras. These cameras didn’t have any of the digital tools that people have gotten used to these days. If someone used a filter, it was a literal physical filter that was secured over the end of someone’s lens. Most people had to focus shots by hand, physically turning a physical control on a camera and judging the focus by eye. Film had to be sent away to be developed in labs in far away locations, using processes that nowadays would be regarded as quite primitive.

So, to have a blurry photograph of a wild animal would not be unusual back then. Still, it really wasn’t a great shot.

Could this photograph be enhanced using the technology we have today? In a word, no.

The image you see at the top of this article is an attempt to do so, using a popular generative AI tool. The original photograph of the Ozark Howler is set in the top left of the generative AI “enhancement” of the photograph. Here it is again:

This is not an effective AI enhancement of a photograph of the Ozark Howler

The AI technology didn’t so much enhance the original photograph as completely reimagine it. The AI bot couldn’t restrain itself from imagining a detailed physique of the Ozark Howler, giving it a lupine appearance with a couple of horns stuck on top. The resulting image doesn’t match the shape of what’s in the original photograph, and it doesn’t match what Ozarks lore tells us about the Howler’s appearance either. What’s more, the AI system inserted a lot of specific foliage in the background, and a rocky forest floor that just doesn’t appear in the original image.

In short, generative AI started almost completely from scratch. It went over the top with unsupported visual details. Today’s technology didn’t help us carefully refine information from a pre-AI past. It just completely overwrote the past with slop.