299 Reanimated

 

" Reanimated "

I have to be honest and say that the first time I saw it I thought it was brilliant and incredibly clever. I can't remember which genealogy site it was I first saw the service but since I think many others have followed very quickly. That service is the reanimation of old photos. Long lost souls brought back to life via a still image. You could take on old black and white or colour photo like the one above and from it the face would start to move and look about like Frankenstein had just pulled the leaver. It is very clever. But it is also creepy. It is not the person and not even a true representation of that person. For example in the extreme I knew a guy when I was younger who used to frequently blink. We all have different mannerisms. It's very much fake. That one is an ancestor of mine who moved from Scotland to New York where he opened his own iron works. 

The technology is amazing for sure. Recently I've seen some videos of brilliant cgi representations of dead people bettered by deep fake videos, bettered because it looks more natural. And that is what they are deep Fake not reanimation. The digital age has brought fantastic progress in photography and video but with it dangers too. These fakes are getting so real that it can cause massive problems for people in the wrong hands. I don't need to spell that out in this age of social media.

Lines are blurring. I looked to restore an old photo as I used to do in photoshop by hand painstakingly. These are not real either. They are though more real than some of the apps I found today which use AI to restore photos at the touch of a button. Looking closely its worrying because I took an old faded photo which was water damaged and it restored the face perfectly. But they were not her eyes they were someone else's. It was not her mouth. The AI matched the ruined part with the closest match and replaced it. It's not real and not a true representation. But it's quick and it's clever so people will accept it. In these modern times when everything seems too much of an effort it's a better option for most but it's not real. Blurred lines get blurrier.