So… Amazing… or creepy?
Creepy!
If Jimi Hendrix were around today, he’d swear off acid after these.
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“Excuse me, while I spit this out!”
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I find this stuff much more interesting than AI generated stuff since it is genuine. This is the oldest known film footage which dates from 1888!
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In all honesty I have no problem with using AI to interpolate frames, and even clean up the image a bit if it’s done by an operator guiding the outcome they want rather just letting the AI completely hallucinate a new video.
The thing I don’t like is turning a still image into a moving image. Quite aside from the glasses which I do not believe to be representative of those likely to have been worn by Lincoln, body language and expression is more than half of in-person communication and how we recognise our friends at distance - imposing a hallucinated motion onto someone’s still photo pretty much takes away their personality and arbitrarily puts an “averaged” personality over them.
In my opinion.
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I’m not sure why I would be more perturbed by an AI animation of a still image than I would be by an actor “hallucinating” their interpretation of the character in a movie or TV show…
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I suppose I realise the actor is playing a part… and I’ve seen actors since I was a kid.
And the actors normally look different from the people they’re portraying…
But yes, maybe it’s just me. And maybe there’s an uncanny valley effect too…
This isn’t a rational objection, it’s me trying to understand why I find these AI animations so creepy.
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My take is that the transition from still image to moving pictures is similar to the transition from reading a book to watching a movie on the book. You mental picture of the person portrayed may be in alignment with whatever the actor/ai is doing, or not.
Now when we envision scanning entire people and transferring their behaviour and antics onto other folks completely, this gets scary.
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An actor will portray anger or sadness or fear with their own expressions and they are therefore “real”.
An AI image may use a generalized expression which doesn’t fit the original person or even actually be one that anyone really has if it averages it out. Our brains, conditioned from birth as we watched others to read expressions, will read that as “wrong”.
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Perhaps if AI gets to a stage where it’s as convincing as an actor I’ll have less of a problem with it … of course I’ll have a problem with it taking work from actual talented performers then 
I still don’t know of any actor who takes a photo of Lincoln, for example, and extrapolates a performance from that and no other information (that’s some Sherlock Holmes nonsense right there 
)
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There is ONE thing you can get from them–how he posed for pictures!
Other than his posture and demeanor in that circumstance, though, you have only written accounts to go on and those are usually translated ie “he appeared angry” not “his eyebrows came together almost to a point and his eyes darkened while his mouth slightly downturned at one corner.”
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The coloration, CGI enhancement and added voices in “They Shall Not Grow Old” was a hack. But one that gave us more knowledge rather than less than we would have by watching the old footage unaided. Daniel Day Lewis’ “Lincoln” was also a hack. But again most of us were smarter rather than dumber after watching the film. Day-Lewis, the director, author Doris Kearns Goodwin all studied for ages to convey their best idea of the man. It was better than a photo at least. The AI stuff is a hack that doesn’t educate. It entertains and titillates. I made a joke about how AI should have gotten best portrayal in another thread. But that’s all it was. Just me throwing a grenade. AI does not produce art. It produces the opposite of art. It is derivative trash. (Sorry, that wasn’t nice. It’s not trash. It is just overrated.)
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The one of Anne Frank made me feel really sad…
I wasn’t going to say anything, because my only real problem with the first two volumes was that I found the unnatural gestures and movements extremely off-putting.
But that is beyond wrong. Totally disrespectful and it completely dishonours her memory.
Disclaimers notwithstanding, peddling it as “History Brought to Life with Ai Magic” is a lie.
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I feel a bit differently. The reason the Anne Frank one made me sad was that for the first time it wasn’t just an old picture for me. The movement and the smile made me think “Oh, she looks like a good kid”. and drove home in a more emotional and visceral way the tragedy of what happened to her.
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I agree completely. This is not respectful, uplifting or educational. It’s just weird. We humans will need to learn to live in a world that is increasingly run by AI. If we let ourselves be seduced by its mimicry of us I do believe we’re hosed.
And I don’t mean this to dismiss your feelings @HiFlyer. But what if the real Anne Frank never smiled like that. You would still be sympathetic to her suffering and horrified by her end. In some ways it is no different than an actor’s portrayal. They too elevate our feelings for the people they portray. The difference to me is that they are based on research and method. Whereas the AI animation is based on billions of hours of footage of people who are not Anne Frank and are not trying to be Anne Frank.
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Please don’t take what I said as directed at you. Apologies if it came across like that.
My comments are squarely aimed at the people or thing that generated that image.
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I don’t think you came across that way. I was a little worried that the post brought out such strong feelings that I may have offended somebody, which was not my intent.
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It’s a tool. Like a knife, a bat, a gun, scissors, a computer, a camera, or plain electricity.
It is neither good nor bad, it is the intent of the wielder that makes it so.
Now the oft-seen pattern of “smart people invent with good intentions and those with evil ones pervert it into something awful” is separate of that, and you can never prevent that inventions will come eventually.
People can debate the ethics or necessity of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but no one will disagree that stopping the Axis before they got nuclear weapons was of paramount importance. Von Braun worked up to WMD V-2s built with POW labor before he converted that knowledge into the Saturn and helped us reach the Moon.
Would there have been a Moon landing in 69 if he’d not been involved and done what he did? Who can say? Was he making up for his past, or was it always a means to an end and he didn’t really care one way or the other?
AI is no different. Those who use it must use it ethically, and not just for profit or political advantage, or it becomes just another type of weapon.