Whoa! Disney's AI aging and de-aging tool is mind-blowingly realistic

Making actors look older or younger has been a eternal challenge for movie studios. It used to be achieved through fairly cumbersome and not always convincing prosthetics and makeup effects. That was then largely replaced by time-consuming digital VFX techniques, but it looks like Disney's come up with a game changer. While publicly accessible AI image generators make an impact on the creative fields, Disney has been working on a studio-quality AI model that can age (and de-age) actors in a way that looks so realistic, it's scary (for more on the use of AI in other creative fields, see how to use DALL-E 2). Making actors look older or younger isn't new. Makeup artist have done some incredible jobs on the likes of David Bowie in The Hunger (1983) and Brad Pitt in the Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008) – the latter had 56 people working in hair and makeup.