Finally! A way to make old family photos even creepier

Animate the Dead

Have you ever taken a look at old family photos and think, "These just aren’t creepy enough!" or "I wish these looked more like the characters from The Polar Express," perhaps? Now they can! Get this: An online genealogy platform has developed AI that allows you to animate old family photos. 

Genealogy website MyHeritage introduced a tool called Deep Nostalgia that leverages AI technology to animate old photographs of dead (or living) relatives.

For example, here are the uncanny results of what happened when we used the tool on a face you might recognize, American President No. 16, Abe Lincoln: 

Deep Nostalgia

The AI that Deep Nostalgia leverages to attain these animations is a bit like the ones used in Deep Fakes. 

Once you upload the photo onto MyHeritage, it's then processed through Deep Nostalgia, and animated based on a set of gestures and movements previously recorded by a model. 

And yes, you can animate several faces in a photo at once. 

Creepy or Magical?

MyHeritage readily admits that the new tool can potentially be polarizing.

"Some people love the Deep Nostalgia feature and consider it magical," MyHeritage states on the Deep Nostalgia web page, "while others find it creepy and dislike it. Indeed, the results can be controversial and it’s hard to stay indifferent to this technology."

So while it’s easy to poke fun at this tool, it is undeniably a fascinating and compelling application of AI—not to mention, it can allow many people to reconnect to their long-passed loved ones through technology, which is always fantastic. 

But also, you can do weird shit like this. 


Share This Article