The Dead blink!

Have you ever been going through boring, old, static family photos and  found yourself wishing that the people in them would, you know, do something? 

I mean, what are we paying them for?

Oh, right, it's because the
results are similarly unnerving.

Well thanks to exciting and disturbing advancements in artificial intelligence technology, now they can! A genealogy company called MyHeritage is offering to animate your old photographs. Well, by animate I mean they can do things like make the people in the photos turn their heads, blink, that kind of thing. It kind of reminds me of how people in the 1800's would prop up the recently deceased when they had family portraits taken. I'm not sure why I make that connection though...

Anyway, it's based on the same deep fake software which you might remember from that fake video Channel 4 in the UK did? The one where the Queen made poop jokes and danced on a table? They said their goal was to warn us about how easy it is to falsify video footage, but I suspect they just thought'd be funny.

Which, I mean, kinda...

Something something...life finds a way?
Look, I'm not great at memes ok?

And it is, super easy apparently. Or so I gather. I mean, I don't know how to do it, but You Tubers have been putting Nick Offerman's face on babies for a couple of years now, so if they can do it, right? By comparison, making people in old photos nod subtly or blink or turn their heads seems pretty simple. Creepy, but simple. And that's super. But at the risk of sounding like a Jeff Goldblum meme, did they stop to thing about whether or not they should?

Your grandparents, brought to you by 

MyHeritage®. All rights reserved.

I mean, not everybody who's ever had their photo snapped at a wedding or a graduation was giving their consent to being turned into one of those living Hogwarts paintings. And do we even know if MyHeritage own your photos once you upload them? Like, sure, it's incredibly unlikely that they'd want to use them for an ad or something. After all, we, like our ancestors before us, are nobodies. But I think we should probably all cultivate a general distrust of online companies that are interested in our old photos. I know how paranoid this sounds (very) but, I don't think it's a long walk, technologically speaking, between animating photos and producing a deep fake last will and testament video where your grandma leaves everything to MyHeritage's CEO.

Again, I'm probably worrying about nothing. I suppose the implications of colorizing, sharpening, and animating someone's old photos are mostly benign. Tacky, in a Ted Turner kind of way, but probably benign. Still though, Abraham Lincoln is doing their ad and something tells me he didn't sign off on it before heading to the theatre. 

Pictured: our sixteenth president, seen here alive and
un-assassinated, working as a shill. And that's...great...