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Deep Nostalgia
The latest internet gadget-thingy is MyAncestry.com’s Deep Nostalgia tool. It animates old photos. I first encountered it on Twitter, where someone posted the results of applying the AI to a picture of Frederick Douglass. It was remarkable. You know it’s fake. But there is a simulacrum of the spark of life, somehow – your brain both rebels and accepts. Uncanny Valley and all that.
I signed up and started running old pictures through the program. The site warns you that the results may trigger Emotions, and that’s wise. I cannot input my parents, because the thought of seeing the old pictures move and smile is unbearable. I put in my grandmother as a 75-year-old, and I felt my eyes smart. Is it the movement that does it? Or is there something in the program that imbues an ineffable element to the fakery that fires a billion dormant neurons that held her memory?
It’s best to stick to relatives you never knew. I reanimated my great-grandfather, and got a brief hint of the smile my grandmother might have seen as a little girl when dad came home to the farm from a trip to town, and she told him about what the dog did. Funny dog!
There is, of course, an immense problem with this technology, as it will demolish our faith in the veracity of moving images completely, and there is nothing we can do about it.
Published in General
Pretty sure this would have been an abomination in the Dune universe.
Well, that’s kinda creepy.
Just wait until your reanimated ancestors scold you about climate change.
On the bright side, animations via algorithms will empower visual storytellers to produce films and games with smaller teams and more focus on art than technicalities.
I remember when greeting card templates on computers were impressive. A combination of innovative services and inherited techniques will continue to offer “wizards” to guide uneducated amateurs through “5 easy steps” to accomplish what once only professionals could do.
Pretty soon we will all be able to manufacture our own “Deep Fakes” at will and you won’t be able to believe any video.
Unreal Engine
I’m trying to imagine this in 10 years. 20? Yikes…
I’m trying hard not to imagine it combined with animated artificial bodies. Blast. Too late. Einstein on the holodeck has nothing on an animatronic Mao Zedong programmed to shout excerpts from the Red Book and with enough AI power to lead the next generation of Red Guards to the unending victory of the worker and peasant class….
Remember the first place this tech is going to be exploited big time is ….. Porn.
So maybe now Biden can start doing press conferences . . . remote, of course.
Just wait until someone gets convicted of murder based on video evidence that later turns out to have been completely manufactured . . .
Before that happens it will have become impossible to convict anyone based on video evidence at all, by showing that it could be fake.
All I can think is that this has something to do with proxy baptisms.
The internet would have been an abomination in the Dune universe.
Bene Gesserit luddites.
I just found a photo of Grandpap leading a parade in 1937. He’s dressed as Abraham Lincoln and riding a horse.
I wonder if they’d animate the horse too. Her name was Becky, because there was always a horse named Becky and a dog named Oscar.
The Frederick Douglass photo/video is startling, and mesmerizing. @jameslileks is, of course, correct that there is nothing we can do about it. This is the type of technology that many will want to ban or suppress–just think of all the bad things that this can be used for, including those already mentioned in the comments. But we need to resist that urge. Suppressing this technology would not make the problem go away. It would make the problem worse. It would develop in the underground or the black market and in ways that made detection harder because we would know less about how it was made.
The solution–if there is one–is to let the market work. As this technology improves, there will be a push to be able to prove videos and images are real or fake. At least I hope that it will. If that happens, then you will have companies competing to develop technology to detect the fakes or imprint digital signatures to show authenticity. I think that Microsoft may already be working on that.
I’ve always thought–or hoped–that one day we’d actually develop most of the technology we see in Star Trek. We already have tricorders, voice-activated computers, touch screens, hyp0-spray, etc. But I kind of figured that holodecks would come towards the end. Mainly because, like warp drive and transporters, they seemed so incredibly fanciful. But here we are. It’s going to get very, very weird.
Sometime soon Polaroids are going to come back and will be the only photos admissible in court.
Bizarre – guarding your personal life is already hard enough. It’s very tempting to go down these roads, especially the DNA research.
I put my father’s image into it – but not the father I knew – I chose the pre-father, aged 18 and fresh out of Navy boot in 1943. It wasn’t particularly hard to deal with the emotions as I see my youthful dad at least twice a month in his grandson. Only the boy, so far, is an upgrade. He drinks sparingly, has never touched the tobacco that killed my old man, and he’s a Marine Sergeant instead of Machinists Mate (2C).
But the sentiments about trusting visual images is here. “Deep fake” technology is now in the hands of everyone, not just Hollywood. That takes the nefarious implications and raises it exponentially as it reduces the potential for mischief to a conspiracy of one.
Like so much of tech, it first made the rounds in porn. The UK press published sanitized versions of clips featuring famous actresses with their face substituted for the porn performer with scarily good results.
Our own editor has been Twitter posting some very disturbing images he produces with an app called “Reface.” (Evidently we pay him too much or don’t keep him busy enough. Exjon as Brittany Spears will keep you up at night.)
I used to believe (and to a certain extent still do) that the potential for fooling the general public lies in documents, not video. But we’re getting there and it’s not going to be pretty.
MM2 to marine sgt isn’t an upgrade.
Swabby to jarhead is the upgrade. (Ducks)
From 1943 to 2021 it is. I’d much rather have my son’s duty than working the boiler in a destroyer escort looking for u-boats.
Thanks for the update. I hadn’t heard of this latest gadget, but a picture of an “animated” Calvin Coolidge showed up in my timeline. Of course, it was a still image, which I found amusing. Now I know the inspiration behind it.
See previous comment about holodecks and animatronics. Ever wanted to do it with Mata Hari? Well….
Once again, subtle stirrings implying a future where sex robot sanitizer will be a career.
Absolutely. It would be like finding two people with the exact same fingerprints . . .
I’ll give them this: zombies are prettier than I imagined.
So, buy stock now. But, seriously, can chemical substrates be laid down buy 3D printing?
For at least a few years now, someone – Fujitsu? – has been marketing instant-print cameras again. I see them in the Target store ads regularly.
Dennis Miller used to say that the day a blue-collar worker can sit in his Barcolounger with a beer and… have sex with… Claudia Schiffer for $19.95, is going to make crack look like Sanka.
Several years ago – could be almost 4 decades now, I suppose – I wrote a never-published sci-fi story based on the premise that computers could use medical body scans etc – and this was long before imaging booths at airport security, etc – to create videos then used for blackmail/control.