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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
I don’t see how that’s a problem. (Someone probably said that already, but I haven’t read any of the comments yet.)
Really? You have security video of someone breaking into your home, maybe stealing all your stuff and physically attacking your family etc, but they aren’t convicted because you can’t prove the video isn’t manufactured?
That’s not a problem?
If the hate media get on the case, it doesn’t matter what video I have. Take a look at what happened in Minneapolis. Video isn’t helping the police guy. It looks like an autopsy will, though. Or look at the video of Georgia ballots being counted. Is that helping anything?
There is so much use of selectively edited video being used to yank on the emotions of viewers, I’d be glad for it all to go away, along with all documentaries. We caught crooks and learned history before we had video cameras, and we can do it again.
Now I’ve got to get back to editing another bicycle ride video.
or worse beg you to make reparations for their sins-the woke universe will love it.
That’s all? Does she take checks?
Some of these still look a little off in the motions of the lips, but otherwise, I’d be entirely fooled. Think of what they’ll be able to do in 20 years. I’m not sure what effects that will have on society outside Hollywood, but it’ll be something.
Carrie Fisher will appear in ALL the future Star Wars movies!
Well, a young Mark Hamill appeared in an episode of the Mandelorian.
But he’s still currently alive, and can be paid royalties etc. Things could get complicated when lots of actors who may not have been alive for DECADES, are “appearing” in brand new stuff again. There could be a lot of wrangling over paying into estates etc, including estates that might also have been closed for decades. And in many cases I expect the studios etc to insist that no payment is needed at all, for some contractual reason or another.
Reminds me of this Monty Python skit.
Interviewer: (Michael Palin) An excerpt from Carl French’s latest film. Carl, we’re all a little mystified by your claim that your new film stars Marilyn Monroe.
Carl French: (Graham Chapman) It does, yes.
Interviewer: Who died over ten years ago?
Carl French: Uh, that’s correct.
Interviewer: Are you lying?
Carl French: No, no, it’s just that she’s very much in the public eye at the moment.
…
Carl French: Look, we got James Dean in it, in a box!
This has the potential to join Twitter and Facebook as seemingly innocuous technological gimmicks that end up with sinister purposes. I’m content with my hazy re-colored portraits and tiny black-and white photos of Olaf and Emma, and leave to my imagination the smile lines appearing around their eyes as they hold hands in front of the North Dakota farmhouse.
Yes, I was wondering how this can be misused? There are a lot of ways. But if you have an animated picture, and his eyes follow you around the room, will he be seeing you?
I don’t think I’d stick around in that room long enough to find out!
And he was marginally less uncanny than zombie Peter Cushing.
Imagine how hard it’s going to be for living breathing actors, many who are idiot primadonas, to compete with the AI Humphrey Bogart or AI Marlon Brando etc etc.
Do you really think AI could capture the reality and creativity and the multi-faceted emotion of a Bogart speaking his lines? AI can tell which pop song will go to number one, but I’ve not heard any AI that can compose a song that goes to number one.
Eventually. Particularly if the AI is writing for a “culture which accustomed people to immediate gratification with little actual work”.
Do you really think it’s possible that people will ever become so divorced from reality that they will prefer the company of AI?
Added: But I guess it may be so. I think I’m seeing the beginning of it already today.
Persons will, but not people I don’t think. And, personally, I have had interactions with SIRI that made me smile.
You mean like a puppy smiling at you and wagging it’s tail? Or something more intellectual and human-like?
More than anything a feeling of being charmed while simultaneously imagining the programmer making the decision. An odd and rarified emotional amalgamation, but still pleasant.
Yeah, OK, but will it have the power to re-animate old genitals?
Asking for a friend.
Thanks for that! Creepy.
I’m so old that playing Unreal Tournament was a digital blast. Seeing these characters move and speak so realistically in the occasional game I crack open is so far removed from the clunky tech of the past, it’s really just a few steps away from “people-izing” avatars, ones we may engage with, invent, relate to, customized for our own experience.
The latest computer games have dialogue where the lips on an animated, computer generated person almost perfectly in sync:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1R0_g0oDIG4
The technology is here, now . . .
But is the mouth animation being created on the fly, to match previously-unknown audio? Or was it pre-produced to go along with pre-programmed “dialogue?”