I've been rewatching your FF9 playthrough and I got curious about getting the PC version of the game to run with the upscaling program you used, Moguri Mod. I've since learned that Moguri mod utilizes Stable Diffusion and another deep learning model.
Would you still recommend this mod for the sake of having a good looking version of an old game that will likely never get that treatment by Square Enix, or has the nightmare of modern LLM model usage soured your opinion on it?
Thank you for all the work you've done over the years.
Yeah, Moguri was first made in 2018-19, as I recall, back when LLMs were still niche tech tools for nerd enthusiasts and not, y'know, The Consuming Beast Whose Maw Threatens To Swallow All.
Personally, time has rather soured me on everything involving genAI, though whatever else you can call Moguri Mod, you certainly can't call it lazy or slop, given that they were manually edge-correcting and lining up like 11.000 image layers by hand to make the upscale work.
Arguably they've put more effort into that mod than Square Enix has put into some official Final Fantasy ports, it comes with a lot of very useful general quality-of-life features, extended controller support, UI improvements, custom fonts and etc.
Insofar as there is any ethical use-case for generative AI models, fans playing around with image upscalers for a non-profit video game mod are probably as close as you're going to get, although obviously the AI model they used for the project will have been trained on non-consensually used images and artwork; this is inherent to the technology. The decision on whether or not you're comfortable with it is going to have to be a personal one.
As for me, as I said, time has soured me. I don't regret playing FF9 with the Moguri mod, all it's really trying to do is unblur and sharpen old low resolution video game assets, not replace them, but idk if I would play FF9 with the mod anymore today. I've gotten better at spotting the telltale signs of LLM processing in images, and it just gives me the ick now in a way it didn't five years ago. I am, philosophically, more of a mind these days to accept the imperfections of things as a feature of their creation. Better, perhaps, to just play the game at the resolution it was made at, even if the official Square Enix port is kinda shit.
Honestly, what I really most want nowadays is to buy a CRT while it's still possible, and play PS1 games in the format they were designed to be seen in—which I guess is the gamer equivalent of getting really into vinyls.
