While many love the Deep Nostalgia feature and consider it magical, others find it uncanny and are uncomfortable with the results.
Likenesses can blink, smile, look around
In one of the eerier new developments in digital photography, an Israeli genealogy company is offering users the opportunity to animate photos of long-dead relatives.
Branded as Deep Nostalgia and released by the company Myheritage, the technology uses artificial intelligence to automatically map faces within family photos and then turn them into digital puppets that can mimic the expressions of an actor. When a photo is uploaded to the Myheritage app, the figures within it are instantly able to blink, smile and look around.
Even the most humourless of great-grandparents can be rendered into smiling and genteel golems, which is why Myheritage is quick to remind users that the whole thing is an illusion.
“The end result is not authentic — it’s a technological simulation of how the person in your photo would have moved and looked if they were captured on video,” wrote the company in an online guide.
Deep Nostalgia is licensed from D-ID, an Israeli tech company that specializes in so-called “deepfake” technology; the digital replacement of someone’s likeness in existing images or video.
In recent years, “deepfakes” have become so convincing that they have spawned concerns of a future where doctored videos become indistinguishable from reality. Just over the weekend, a Tiktok account gained millions of views for its uncanny deepfakes of actor Tom Cruise made by an unidentified impersonator.
As early as 2018, the
Canadian pornographic video hosting site Pornhub banned any user-uploaded videos that digitally grafted celebrity faces onto those of adult actors — but the lightly enforced rule has had mixed success.
D-ID’S research, by contrast, is focused on using deepfakes as a way to protect online privacy and counter the growing accuracy of facial recognition technology. The idea is that, say, a Hong Kong dissident can use D-ID software to upload videos using an altered version of their real face that can’t be tracked by authorities. Hence the company’s name, De-identification.
D-ID has also proposed using their technology to protect the identity of whistleblowers and sex assault victims testifying at trial or appearing in documentary films.
In a statement issued at this week’s launch of Deep Nostalgia, D-ID CEO Gil Perry said that millions “can now connect to their ancestors in ways never before imagined.”
Within hours of its debut, Deep Nostalgia was being used to animate images of Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass and Marie Curie. Users soon found it also worked relatively well on paintings such as the Mona Lisa or Vincent Van Gogh’s 1889 self-portrait.
Nevertheless, Myheritage acknowledged that it has crossed a frontier that some may find unsettling.
“While many love the Deep Nostalgia™ feature and consider it magical, others find it uncanny and are uncomfortable with the results,” wrote Myheritage this week.
Although D-ID’S technology could easily be used to have dead family members recite poems or sing songs, this is a bridge too far for Myheritage. “Our driver videos don’t include speech in order to prevent abuse of this feature, such as the creation of ‘deep fake’ videos of living people,” wrote the company.