Deepfake technology brings old photos to life

Deepfake technology brings old photos to life

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01 March 2021

It is well known that deepfake technology has been mainly linked to malicious applications, such as celebrities online shaming through fake pornographic images and videos, but we often observe extremely interesting uses.

MyHeritage is a typical example. It is a company taking action in the genealogy and created the Deep Nostalgia tool to give motion to old images of our ancestors.

This new technology has been developed by the Israeli D-ID and operates in the following way: The user uploads old images - portraits of his ancestors (e.g., the great-grandfather at a young age) on MyHeritage site and then Deep Nostalgia modifies the photo by applying an algorithm to give motion to the face. The choice of movement is made through a large database of stored data from the company and automatically by the algorithm to match with the particular photograph taken by the user.

The result is pretty impressive, although MyHeritage highlights the users’ restriction, because someone may find it macabre that his ancestor would come to life even for a few seconds. Stakeholders can create a free account on the website and upload up to 5 images, however, if they want more, they should subscribe.

It should be mentioned that within the first 48 hours of the Deep Nostalgia launch, more than 1 million photos were processed!

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