by glitchc 3 hours ago

Probably compression followed by regeneration during decompression. There's a brilliant technique called "Seam Carving" [1] invented two decades ago that enables content aware resizing of photos and can be sequentially applied to frames in a video stream. It's used everywhere nowadays. It wouldn't surprise me that arbitrary enlargements are artifacts produced by such techniques.

[1] https://github.com/vivianhylee/seam-carving