Artificial intelligence (AI) can now transform photos of people into short, highly realistic animations, as well as moving images in the newspapers and posters of the magical world of Harry Potter.
In these AI-animated clips, faces that were previously frozen in time blink, turn their heads and even smile, their movements oscillating between surprisingly realistic and deeply disturbing (and yes, absolutely frightening).
Genealogy website My inheritance presented the animation mechanism on February 25th. Developed by the technology company D-ID and known as Deep nostalgia, allows users to animate photos through the MyHeritage website, representatives said in a blog post. D-ID designed custom algorithms that digitally recreate the naturalistic movement of human faces, applying these subtle movements to photographs and modifying facial expressions that move like human faces normally move, according to the Site D-ID.
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When AIs create original video footage, often referred to as “deepfake, “they do this using a method called opposing generation networks, or GANs. This technique pits two AIs against each other; one produces content and the other evaluates how well that content emulates the real. becomes better, until the content of original AI is very difficult to identify as false.
These videos can be used in worrying ways: showing political figures making fake speeches, to add faces of famous actresses to the bodies of actresses in pornographic films, Vice reported in 2018.
However, the video clips generated by Deep Nostalgia are only a few seconds long, and the AI training images did not include speech, in order to avoid creating deepfakes, according to MyHeritage.
The programmers trained Deep Nostalgia’s GAN with sets of “plant videos”, each representing different combinations of movements for eyes, mouths, eyebrows, cheeks and heads; AI then learned how it could be applied to pictures of different people to achieve an illusion of realistic movement. He assigns different facial gesture suites to different photos, depending on the postures and orientations of his subjects, according to MyHeritage.
The results in the animations may vary, depending on the quality of the original image and how the person in the photo posed. The illusion tends to be most effective when the subject is facing the camera, and the end result may be less convincing when the algorithm needs to create digital information to represent something that was missing from the original image, “like teeth or ears”, Representatives MyHeritage said.
Deep Nostalgia may also find it difficult to realistically incorporate accessories such as hats or glasses, which can obscure parts of the face and head. In these cases, “sometimes the simulated movement works well – and other times it doesn’t,” according to the website.
While MyHeritage encouraged users to test Deep Nostalgia with family photos, Twitter users shared examples of some famous faces from the past, such as the poet Emily Dickinson; chemist and x-ray crystallographer Rosalind Franklin; and abolitionist Frederick Douglass.
Frederick Douglass, the powerful abolitionist, was the most photographed person in the United States during the 19th century. That’s how he looked on the move. Get ready and press play. pic.twitter.com/HOxDK7jGyhFebruary 28, 2021
Originally published on Live Science.