Artificial intelligence (AI) can now turn photos of people into short, highly realistic animations, such as the moving pictures in the newspapers and posters of Harry Potter’s magical world.
In these AI-animated clips, faces that were previously frozen on time turn their heads and smile even as their movements falter between surprisingly lifelike and deeply disturbing (and yes, downright creepy).
Genealogy website MyHeritage launched the animation engine on February 25th. Developed by the technology company D-ID and known as Deep nostalgia, enables users to animate photos through the MyHeritage website, representatives said in a blogpos. D-ID has designed custom algorithms that digitally recreate the naturalistic motion of human faces, apply the subtle motions to photographs, and change facial expressions that move as human faces normally do, according to the D-ID website.
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When AIs make original video recordings, often referred to as “deep forgery, “they do this using a method called generative adverse networks, or GANs. This technique pits two AIs against each other; one produces content and the other evaluates how well the content follows the real thing. Over time, the algorithms after each other get better, until the original AI content is very difficult than false.
Such videos can be used in tricky ways: to point out political figures giving false speeches, to add the faces of famous actresses to the bodies of actresses in pornographic films, Vice reported in 2018.
However, video clips generated by Deep Nostalgia are only a few seconds long, and the training material for AI did not include speech, to create theft, according to MyHeritage.
Programmers trained Deep Nostalgia’s GAN with sets of “blueprint videos”, each featuring different combinations of movements for eyes, mouth, eyebrows, cheeks and heads; the AI then learned how to apply it to photos of different people to create the illusion of realistic movement. According to MyHeritage, different suites of facial gestures are assigned to different photos depending on their attitude and orientations of their subjects.
Results in the animations may vary depending on the quality of the original image and how the person poses in the photo. The illusion is mostly effective when the subject is looking at the camera, and the end result may be less convincing if the algorithm has to create digital information to represent something missing in the original picture, such as teeth or ears. MyHeritage representatives said.
Deep nostalgia can also struggle to incorporate accessories such as hats or glasses, which can obscure parts of the face and head. In those cases, “the simulated movement sometimes works well – and other times not,” according to the website.
While MyHeritage has encouraged users to test deep nostalgia with family photos, Twitter users have shared examples of familiar faces from the past, such as the poet Emily Dickinson; chemist and X-ray crystallograph Rosalind Franklin; an abolitionist Frederick Douglass.
Frederick Douglass, the mighty abolitionist, was the most photographed person in the United States during the nineteenth century. Here’s how he might have looked in motion. Support yourself and hit play. pic.twitter.com/HOxDK7jGyh28 February 2021
Originally published on Live Science.