> You fundamentally can't get back information that has been destroyed/or never captured in the first place.
I love this cliché. I've seen it thousands of times, and probably written it myself a few times. We all repeat stuff like that ad nauseam, without ever thinking.
Because it's fundamentally flawed, especially in the context that it has usually been applied to, namely criticising the CSI:XYZ trope of "enhancing images".
The truth is that there is a lot more information in a low-res image than meets the eye.
Even if you can't read the letters on a license plate, it can be recovered by an algorithm. If the Empire State Building is in the background, it's likely to be a US license plate. Maybe only some letters would result in the photo's low-res pattern. If you only see part of a letter, knowing the font may allow you to rule out many letters or numbers etc...
It's similar to that guy who used Photoshop's swirl effect to hide his face, not knowing that the effect is deterministic, and can easily be undone.
The error mostly appears to be in assuming that the information has been destroyed, when in reality it's often just obscured. And Neural Nets are excellent in squeezing all the information out noisy data.