Oh they'll make it look better ... eventually it will look photo real, because AI filters can already do that now. 

There's probably no reason this kind of thing can't be applied to real time games right now or soon enough ...

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/nqLqC3VSmgs

But likely you won't own the GPU by that point or it will cost a fortune. 

Nvidia wants to move away from selling consumer grade GPUs, that's not where the big money is at, if they can shift gaming towards AI generated imagery, they can sell a shit ton of servers to whatever game company chooses to stream those assets. They're not doing this for gamers. 

What they want is an endless loop where all these companies buying AI servers now have to keep buying new ones every 3-5 years, and LLMs isn't going to cut it alone. You need to higher intensive compute tasks ... like say video rendering and real time video game environments ... that will definitely force a lot of AI spend because the compute requirements on that will be through the roof. 

Even for this "beginning step" they're likely going to ask for $3000++ for a 6090 GPU, lol, might be low balling it there because even 5090s are going for $4000+ each on the open market right now and I'm sure Nvidia sees that. 

Looks so much better with the tonemap tweak. Does a better job of preserving the original intended design while improving the lighting some. 

I'm just pointing out that your assertion was meaningless as a criticism in the context that every human activity will, in fact, "damage the environment," and this one is rather low in the scale of environmental impact.

Images and slop videos make up single digits of the compute inference demand, by the way, and if you were to argue these should be more regulated or not even acessible to the public at large, I'd tend to agree with you. But most usage comes from free users adopting it as a Google substitute (which comes as a wash in terms of power consumption since the cost per token has been dropping like a rock) and reasoning coding models that people are paying for to use in their jobs.

Yep, a lot of the high-contrast look that people are complaining looks like movies or generated videos/images seems to solved just by shifting the tone-mapping back. 

I actually like the high-contrast, chiaroscuro look. 

The fact that other human activities also damage the environment doesn't mean that the cumulative cost of AI as a whole isn't harmful though; the risk is that if big tech is allowed to go ahead with the number of data centres they want to built, then the cost will skyrocket, and not just in terms of environmental damage, but also in terms of driving up the cost of electronics, water, electricity, etc for ordinary people.

So when are we supposed to start caring? I mean you dont seem to be very upset about the Switch 2 using AI upscaling. When does it become harmful?

As I already stated, upscaling is one of the few positive use cases for AI. Technically you don't have to care at all, that's entirely up to you, I'm simply outlining why many people do care about the negative effects of AI as a whole.