By now if you’ve been on the internet for long enough, you might be familiar with “rickrolling”, which basically involves someone linking or playing a clip of Rick Astley’s Never Gonna Give You Up. The music video itself is pretty old as it was filmed back in 1987 where concepts like Full HD, let alone 4K, weren’t even fathomable yet.
The video certainly feels a bit out of place with its low resolution and grainy texture, but a video uploaded by Revideo shows what the video could look like had it been filmed using today’s technology. According to the YouTuber, this was made possible thanks to the use of AI in the Topaz Video Enhance.
For those unfamiliar, this is a software designed to upscale older videos to higher resolution by using AI. Upscaling is more than just about increasing the resolution. This is because a video filmed at lower resolution has less details than one filmed at a higher resolution. This means that upscaling it manually would result in a video even more pixelated than before.
However, by using AI to upscale, it tries to be smarter about the process by predicting what the video could look like if it were shot on 4K. In this particular instance, Rick Astley’s Never Gonna Give You Up looks incredibly crisp and buttery smooth which could change the way we use the meme in the future.