MyHeritage now lets you animate old family photos using deepfakery – TechCrunch

AI-enabled synthetic media is being used as a tool for manipulating real emotions and capturing user data by genealogy service MyHeritage, which has just launched a new feature -- called "deep nostalgia" -- that lets users upload a photo of a person (or several people) to see individual faces animated by algorithm. The Black Mirror-style pull of seeing long-lost relatives -- or famous people from another era -- brought to a synthetic approximation of life, eyes swivelling, faces tilting as if they're wondering why they're stuck inside this useless digital photo frame, has led to an inexorable stream of social shares since it was unveiled yesterday at a family history conference… This is my great-grandmother, Kathleen. I've always felt so close to her even though she died when I was 2 years old. This #DeepNostalgia video brought tears to my eyes to see her move, almost like seeing her as she was posing for this photo. MyHeritage's AI-powered viral marketing playbook with this deepfakery isn't a complicated one: They're going straight for tugging on your heart strings to grab data that can be used to drive sign-ups for their other (paid) services.