Nostalgia sells and traders know it. People like to fantasize about a past that they consider better than it probably is – and wonder what it might have been like for their relatives who lived it. To capitalize on this, a genealogy tracking service called MyHeritage launched an AI-powered tool called Deep Nostalgia, which animates old photos of users’ family members, deceased or not.
Several service users have taken to Twitter to share animated images of their great-grandparents, revived and exhibiting various facial expressions. The style of each video is almost the same: the subject moves his eyes around and then tilts his head a little, as if trying to remember something in response to a question, before looking back at the viewer. But then, it is early for the service, and it will likely become much more flexible in the future.
Check out this example found on Twitter below:
Mainly an ad and a fad? – We would never dissuade people from exploiting their ancestry or heritage, but this particular tool from MyHeritage looks like little more than a marketing project … much like your previous attempt at virality, where you used AI to improve the quality of old photos from family.
MyHeritage asks for a lot of user data, which can later be used to try to sell customers paid services. There are also legitimate concerns around the use and protection of users’ DNA. The criticism also applies to other industry giants, such as Ancestry, 23andMe and FamilyTreeDNA, which promise to provide a wealth of information about their roots in exchange for their privacy. Confidential information like the user’s DNA is stored in massive databases that can be sold to medical technology companies … or that can be compromised through hacks.
“Free” – While reviving old photos is a novelty and using the service is ostensibly free, we can’t help feeling that seeing meemaw as an animated deepfake may not be worth agreeing to with MyHeritage’s privacy policy and terms of service, because who knows where those images can end. Also, if meemaw has moved away from this deadly spiral, we can’t exactly get it to consent.