It's a hill I'm prepared to die on 😂

No, but AI can be used to make up "evidence" and falsely convict people through "science", "technology", and "math" that people don't understand but assume is correct because computers or something.

There have been upscaling AIs for a few years, which can take a blurry picture and then e.g. guess that some pixels are probably hair, so it'll swap those out for a custom rendered version of hair.

Sometimes that works well, but you often still have Uncanny Valley stuff going on. I also certainly don't feel like they're better at actually interpreting low-res images than humans, not in their current state.

And well, it should also be noted that if you prime such an AI with an image of the suspect, it will absolutely find a way to make a blurry mess of pixels look like that. So, it certainly shouldn't serve as the only evidence.

Calm down there, you’re starting to sound all inquisitive & such. Like that creamsicle lookin’ fella from the show.

This already happens. See the Samsung S23 Ultra Moon picture marketing that turned out to be a lie.

There has been for some time AI image and video resolution upscaling for some time, and it works very very well. Allows zoom and "enhance" but not to the ridiculous scale we see here of course. But you can take standard CCTV footage and 4k upscale it and zoom. Its very impressive.

Or Diana Troi