The overwhelming backlash against Nvidia’s new DLSS 5 feature that uses AI to yassify video games has clearly rattled CEO Jensen Huang, who’s now insisting that he actually hates AI’s horrible and homogenous aesthetic as much as gamers do.
“I think their perspective makes sense and I can see where they’re coming from, because I don’t love AI slop myself,” Huang said during an interview in a new episode of the Lex Fridman podcast, as quoted by Kotaku. “You know, all of the AI-generated content increasingly looks similar and they’re all beautiful and so I’m empathetic towards what they’re thinking.”
It’s kind of an astonishing line for Huang to take, sincerely or not, given that his company ballooned to a near $5 trillion valuation off providing the hardware for the generative AI boom — and the tidal wave of slop that’s come with it.
Here comes that inevitable conjunction, though: “But that’s not what DLSS 5 is trying to do,” Huang insisted.
After DLSS 5 was unveiled with a video demo last week, gamers and developers from every corner of the internet retaliated by calling it “slop” and accusing it of undermining artistic intent. It was relentlessly mocked in memes and nicknamed “sloptracing,” a play on Nvidia’s raytracing tech for realistically simulating light.
It was the rare example of gamer outrage being warranted: the feature used a generative AI model to plaster a familiar hyperreal AI sheen onto the games’ graphics, making character faces look Facetuned to conform to trendy beauty standards. It even produced classic AI hallucinations, with one character given a grotesque “giga-nostril” after the feature appeared to misinterpret a facial shadow as part of his nose.
Huang days later questionably struck back by calling gamers “completely wrong” — the thrust of all ironclad arguments — claiming that DLSS 5 doesn’t take away from “artistic control.” The long and short of his jargon laden defense was that the generative AI feature wasn’t a post-processing filter, but anchored to the game’s geometry and lighting data, which developers could fine-tune to keep in line with their aesthetic vision.
His defense was seemingly undermined when Nvidia employee Jacob Freeman revealed to PC gaming YouTuber Daniel Owen that DLSS 5 only works off of 2D frame data — not 3D lighting and geometry.
Still, Huang stuck to his guns on the podcast appearance. DLSS 5 is “ground truth structure data guided,” he insisted. “And so the artist determined the geometry we are completely truthful to. The geometry maintains in every single frame.”
“DLSS is integrated with the artist, and so it’s about giving the artist the tool of AI, the tool of generative AI,” Huang added. “They could decide not to use it, you know?”
That they could.
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