At the top is a screenshot from Wikimedia Commons showing an image that was updated to a larger size with the comment saying "Improved image". Below it is the goose chasing meme with the goose twice asking "Where did the pixels come from?".
The pixels were handfilled by Georg in the basement. It's his special interest and the council made the post of pixel-filler-upperer so that he too can be gainfully employed. It was either this or eating every spider in the municipality, which is his other special interest, and that sort of thing is frowned upon because of the ecological impact.
No. If we can upscale images with AI, then we can nondestructively wait for better AI to do it in the future. This is the same problem as early 1900s archaeologists tearing up dig sites with dynamite forgetting that future archaeologists will be even better.
I've never seen an AI upscaled image that didn't look like shit. Even if it looked good it would still be artificial. We could go into the philosophy of weather or not a photo is an accurate snapshot of a moment in time, but think of it this way: let's say we have a photo of you. Let's also say you want to upscale that photo of you to some redicously high resolution for some reason. The AI upscaled image created is no longer a photo of you. It is an machine's best guess at what you look like in Super 14K or whatever resolution. In essence, It's inauthentic.
The increased "detail" is entirely made up, based off whatever the AI model considers likely to be there based off similar images. AI isn't somehow magically finding pixels that don't exist, it's effectively just guessing them.
I swear, were none of you people around for the LSD dogslugs of early image generation/style matching? Or the slightly newer "this person is not real" portrait generators that would merge hair and glasses, and often give multiple sets of eyes when glasses were at odd angles? This is effectively that with considerably more training data thrown at it.
It's all made up. The AI isn't taking another picture of the object with a higher resolution camera. It's spreading out the existing pixels and doing a best guess to fill in the blanks. Maybe that's fine for a family portait or something (I don't agree, but you do you), but that's definitively not OK for any sort of actual reference material.