These Animated “Deep Nostalgia” Photos of Dead People Are WILD

You’ve heard of deep fakes: where someone with the help of an AI digitally pastes one face onto another person’s actions. It’s incredibly eerie all on its own, but when we’re talking about one living face getting plastered on another, there’s a level of “weird, but fine” there. It’s a little more complicated when the deep fake technology is being used to create “deep nostalgia” and bring long-dead relatives and famous figures back to digital “life.”

Deep Nostalgia is a service from the genealogy website MyHeritage (which is crashing pretty hard right now due to everyone using this, so don’t be surprised if that link takes you to an error page) and was launched late in February. The service uses a technology called Deep Learning to transform still pictures into eerily alive moving images. Just input an old photo of a departed loved one and … there you go.

And so of course, folks are using this to bring famous figures back to life and I have to say, it’s kind of incredible seeing people like Frederick Douglass, Oscar Wilde, Harriet Tubman, Alfred Einstein, and many more “come back to life.”

There are certainly detractors to this kind of digital resurrection. I’ve seen the words “uncanny valley” a lot in response to some of these going viral, but it’s so fascinating to me because the technology genuinely makes these people look alive and real. And to be fair, for a lot of folks, that’s incredibly creepy. It’s like walking through the halls of Hogwarts with all the living paintings … if they start talking, we’ve probably gone too far.

What’s also fun is that users figured out that the faces they submit didn’t have to be just photographs, and those results are even wilder.

I think I may prefer the painting to the enlivened photographs, they’re not quite as ghostly and more just … magical.

Then again … sometimes technology can go too far.

What do you think? Is this new tech creepy or awesome or a little bit of both? Who would you like to see get the “Deep Nostalgia” treatment?

(via The Guardian, images: MyHeritage via screenshots, Twitter)

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Jessica Mason

Jessica Mason (she/her) is a writer based in Portland, Oregon with a focus on fandom, queer representation, and amazing women in film and television. She's a trained lawyer and opera singer as well as a mom and author.

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