Photos of Amelia Earhart, Marie Curie and others come alive (creepily), thanks to AI

Artificial intelligence (AI) can now transform photos of people into short, highly realistic animations, much like the moving pictures in the newspapers and posters of Harry Potter's magical world. In these AI-animated clips, faces that were once frozen in time blink, turn their heads and even smile, their movements wavering between astonishingly lifelike and deeply unsettling (and yes, downright creepy). Genealogy website MyHeritage introduced the animation engine on Feb. 25. Developed by technology company D-ID and known as Deep Nostalgia, it enables users to animate photos via the MyHeritage website, representatives said in a blog post. D-ID designed custom algorithms that recreate the naturalistic movement of human faces digitally, applying those subtle movements to photographs and modifying facial expressions that move as human faces normally do, according to the D-ID website.