‘Deep Nostalgia’ is one of the photography stories of the year. But how does the AI tech re-animate our photos, and where is this all headed?
The last year has produced a succession of Black Mirror -style moments, but one of the most memorable was the arrival of an AI tool that could animate our old family photos with disturbing realism. Called ‘Deep Nostalgia’, it landed in late February and charmed social media with its ability to quickly and convincingly animate all kinds of faces: distant relations, statues, tattoos and, of course, the poster for The Nightmare on Elm Street. Like pretty much everything, the tech divided internet opinion. Some found it to be a heartwarming cheat code for ‘meeting’ old relations they’d never met. Others felt it bordered on necromancy. Most of us were probably in a conflicted space somewhere in between. But the big news for photography is that it now exists – and in a form that has massive mainstream potential. But how exactly does AI and machine learning reanimate your old family photos? And where is this all heading? ‘Deep Nostalgia’ came from the genealogy firm MyHeritage, but it actually licensed the tech from Israeli company D-ID (short for ‘De-Identification’). We had a fascinating chat with D-ID’s Co-Founder & CEO Gil Perry to find out the answers to those questions – and why he thinks most visual media on the internet will be ‘synthetic’ within the next decade… D-ID’s ‘Live Portrait’ tech might be new, but its fundamentals aren’t. Facial re-animation based on machine learning was demoed as far back as 1997, while in 2016 the Face2Face program gave us ‘Deep Nostalgia’ chills by turning George Bush and Vladimir Putin into real-time digital puppets. But in the past few years the tech has made a crucial leap – from the mildly reassuring confines of university research papers and onto our smartphones. With free services like Deep Nostalgia and Avatarify able to whip up convincing videos from a single still photo, Pandora’s re-animated box has been flung open. For a while now, it’s been relatively easy for computers to invent a new person in photo form – if you haven’t seen it before, we apologize for sending you down the rabbit hole that is This Person Does Not Exist, which itself went viral in 2019. What’s much harder is convincingly generating a moving person from a single still image, including information that simply isn’t there. This is what D-ID has seemingly managed to crack. As Gil Perry told us: « The hard part is not just transforming the face and animating it. The rocket science here is how to make it look 100% real. » According to Perry, the biggest challenge D-ID had to overcome with its ‘Live Portraits’ was the lack of information you get from a single photo. Earlier attempts at facial re-animation have required lots of training data and also struggled with ‘occlusion’ (parts of the face being obstructed by hands or other objects). But this is something D-ID has made big strides in. « The hard part is when you have no different angles – for example, you can upload a photo which is very frontal and without teeth, » he said. « Our algorithms know how to predict and create the missing parts that you didn’t have in the photo – for example, ears, teeth, the background. Basically, we cross what people call the uncanny valley. » The internet’s mixed response to ‘Deep Nostalgia’ (which is based on D-ID’s tech) perhaps shows it hasn’t fully traversed that threshold yet, but it’s certainly making good headway.
