Bring out your dead..

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Gob
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Joined: Tue Apr 06, 2010 8:40 am

Bring out your dead..

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Deep Nostalgia, a new service from the genealogy site MyHeritage that animates old family photos, has gone viral on social media, in another example of how AI-based image manipulation is becoming increasingly mainstream.


Launched in late February, the service uses an AI technique called deep learning to automatically animate faces in photos uploaded to the system. Because of its ease of use, and free trial, it soon took off on Twitter, where users uploading animated versions of old family photos, celebrity pictures, and even drawings and illustrations.

Like most “deepfakes” – the name for the popular use of this technology to map one person’s face on to footage of another – the service is exceptionally good at smoothly animating features and expressions. But it can also struggle to generate data to fill in the “gaps” in what it can see from the source photos, causing a sense of the uncanny.

“Some people love the Deep Nostalgia feature and consider it magical, while others find it creepy and dislike it,” MyHeritage says about its technology. “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.”

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