This was my first impression as well, except with less knowledge on the subject. Someone, somewhere said "huh...", and placed another filter into the pipeline

This was my first impression as well, except with less knowledge on the subject. Someone, somewhere said "huh...", and placed another filter into the pipeline to handle these types of images. While looking for something to sound smart wrt the tank-training myth, I found this interesting page: https://www.gwern.net/Tanks https://www.gwern.net/Tanks "The Neural Net Tank Urban Legend" And interestingly, looking at the link for "superresolution needing learned downscalers" found this: https://arxiv.org/abs/1907.12904 https://arxiv.org/abs/1907.12904 "Learned Image Downscaling for Upscaling using Content Adaptive Resampler", code available at https://github.com/sunwj/CAR https://github.com/sunwj/CAR So, IDK, seems like this Fawkes approach will be an interesting paper.