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AI Service Will Creepily Animate Old Family Photos

Author Laila Abuelhawa

The genealogy site MyHeritage is offering a new service called “Deep Nostalgia,” where old family photos are given life, through animation.

This creepy phenomenon brings once-frozen faces blinking, head-turning, and smiling in the animated clips, which have gone viral on Twitter.

The Guardian reports an AI-based image manipulation technique called “deep learning” automatically animates faces in photos uploaded to the system. In addition to animating old family photos, celebrity pictures, drawings and illustrations are able to undergo animated transformation.

“Some people love the Deep Nostalgia feature and consider it magical, while others find it creepy and dislike it. Indeed, the results can be controversial and it’s hard to stay indifferent to this technology. This feature is intended for nostalgic use, that is, to bring beloved ancestors back to life. Our driver videos don’t include speech in order to prevent abuse of this, such as the creation of ‘deep fake’ videos of living people,” MyHeritage said on their site.

Like most “deepfakes,” (a name for technology that maps a person’s face on to video footage of another) the service is quite proficient at seamlessly animating features and capturing expressions. However, this technology isn’t perfect, as Twitter users were quick to point out.

https://twitter.com/markyarm/status/1366133065735618561?s=20

As if this statue of Cristiano Renaldo wasn’t cursed enough:

Deep Nostalgia offers a free trial and is user-friendly.

Laila Abuelhawa is the Top 40 and Hip-Hop pop culture writer for Beasley Media Group. Being with the company for over three years, Laila's fierce and fabulous red-carpet rankings have earned her a feature on 'The Late Show with Stephen Colbert!' Her favorite stories are those surrounding the latest in celebrity fashion, television and film rankings, and how the world reacts to major celebrity news. With a background in journalism, Laila's stories ensure accuracy and offer background information on stars that you wouldn't have otherwise known. She prides herself in covering stories that inform the public about what is currently happening and what is to come in the ever-changing, ever-evolving media landscape.
Author Laila Abuelhawa
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