Have you seen NVIDIA's new DLSS 5? If you haven't heard of it, it's an AI-powered program that effectively takes any given video game and increases its realism to the point where it borders on photo-realistic. It works better on environments than characters, but even on characters, the difference is noticeable and incredible.
NVIDIA displayed this new technology in a post on X, and as most things do, it's caused something of a war between the internet denizens of the world. Some are all for it, and others think this is something close to artistic blasphemy.
Announcing NVIDIA DLSS 5, an AI-powered breakthrough in visual fidelity for games, coming this fall.
— NVIDIA GeForce (@NVIDIAGeForce) March 16, 2026
DLSS 5 infuses pixels with photorealistic lighting and materials, bridging the gap between rendering and reality.
Learn More → https://t.co/yHON3nGyxE pic.twitter.com/UvF9G7tlZs
When I first saw it, I sat there thinking for a long time about which side I would fall on, and to be honest, I'm still not entirely sure. As of this moment, I don't think that either camp has been able to prove the other wrong, and that's because I think that both camps are right.
In a way, this is an awful blow to artistic creation because, with this kind of technology, a designer can put in a little bit of work and then just tell the AI to do the rest. It's lazy, and it will create a stylization issue that will have a lot of video games looking like AI slop.
By the way, before you shrug and suggest that this doesn't matter because you don't play video games, rest assured that NVIDIA's technology will be infecting pretty much every form of entertainment there is. It won't even stop at entertainment. As it improves, I predict that much of what you see on television, the internet, etc., will somehow be "enhanced" or "corrected" by AI in real time.
To what extent this happens, I'm not sure, but I predict that there will be laws that prohibit the usage of this technology in news reporting, but I digress.
The point is, I see this harming the creativity of humanity as a whole, as AI will become a shortcut everyone uses to improve their "art." You can see it happening already with people creating movies and shows utilizing AI tools. At the moment, you can tell it's AI, but this won't be the case for very much longer. NVIDIA's AI creation shows that we're on the verge of reality being something easily mimicked.
But in other ways, I can see this opening up a lot of opportunities for people's artistic ideas to come to fruition, when they didn't have the time or talent to develop certain skills while they focused on others. That occurred to me as I was working on my own recent YouTube video. I cannot, to save my life, create cross-hatch images with a pen that look good in any regard, and I was relying on AI to help me create images to illustrate the stories I was trying to tell. I'm absolutely thrilled that this tech is here because now it allows me to do something I otherwise wouldn't be able to.
I think the question boils down to when and where AI is proper to use during the creation of art. Today, people are saying that any usage of this AI-driven technology is awful, but in five years, I see this technology being so widely used that it'd be hard to imagine a time without it. The modding community will learn how to utilize it to program all sorts of AI-driven corrections, additions, and goofy nonsense to games as they always have. I even predict it will be used to enhance or add to old movies.
Where does the line between AI-assisted art and AI slop get placed? I'm not sure yet, but I do know that the horse is out of the barn. Pandora's box has been opened. There's no going back now. It all comes down to how we use it.
And I think that's something that we, not as a society, but as a species, need to come to terms with. AI is going to be an ever-increasing part of our lives; we just have to decide how much of it we give over before it becomes too much.
