Part VII - remastering the VHS kills? Do we finally have the technology?

As we all know, Part VII was absolutely butchered by the MPAA, meaning that very little of the actual butchering by Jason made it into the final cut. Over the years, fans have done amazing work to restore the film to what it could have been, but those VHS scenes still look... well, they look like grainy VHS scenes. If you haven't seen it yet, the version by VirtualHex is probably the definitive edit to date, which is fantastic work. But it got me thinking...

Wouldn't it be possible to use an AI model (trained ethically*) to take the VHS footage and re-imagine the visuals to be fully consistent with the footage from the rest of the film, but retaining the motion and acting from the VHS workprint?

If I had the technical know-how, I would absolutely be doing this myself, but it's way beyond my skills. I know Shout Factory have a very firm stance against using AI to restore films, but seeing what some of these models are capable of makes me think that we are incredibly close to being able to see the film as close to what Buechler had originally intended it to be.

It does feel slightly perverse to use a digital technology to re-create practical effects, but I wonder what everyone else thinks?

* - I know GenAI is a complicated area from an ethical perspective, but there are definitely models and engines which claim to be trained only on fully licensed imagery (I won't link any here because I don't want to promote any in particular), so in theory they aren't 'stealing' from anyone's work. Or, in an ideal world, could a very focused custom engine be trained purely on part VII, or possibly the full franchise if more training input was needed)? Either way, I do think there are ways around some of the ethical problems of using GenAI in order to restore previously unrecoverable footage.