In 2025 you can add quality to jpegs. Your phone does it and you don't even notice. So the rhetorical metaphor employed holds up, in that AI is rapidly changing the fundamentals of how technology functions beyond our capacity to anticipate or keep up with it.
> add quality to jpegs
Define "quality", you can make an image subjectively more visually pleasing but you can't recover data that wasn't there in the first place
You can if you know what to fill from other sources.
Like, the grill of a car. If we know the make and year, we can add detail with each zoom by filling in from external sources
This is an especially bad example, a nice shiny grille is going to be strongly reflecting stuff that isn't already part of the image (and likely isn't covered well by adjacent pixels due the angle doubling of reflection).
Is this like how crypto changed finance and currency