The very concept of teaching with deep fake technology may be unsettling to some. After all, deep fake technology, which utilizes AI and machine learning and can alter videos and animate photographs in a manner that appears realistic, has frequently been covered in a negative light. The technology can be used to violate privacy and create fake videos of real people. However, while these potential abuses of the technology are real and concerning that doesn't mean we should turn a blind eye to the technology's potential when using it responsibly, says Jaime Donally, a well-known immersive learning expert. "Typically, when we're hearing about it, it's in terms of the negative – impersonation and giving false claims," Donally says.

It's hard to explain the mix of emotions that spark upon seeing a photo of Frederick Douglass come alive with the click of a button. And yet, there he is, blinking and nodding as if he were just alive yesterday, as if he hadn't died in 1895, years before film recording became commonplace. His animated image and others like it -- at the same time unsettling, emotional, and a bit fantastical, are made possible by Deep Nostalgia, an artificial intelligence program from the genealogy platform MyHeritage. As far as AI-animated images go, the technology behind these Harry Potter-esque photos isn't particularly complex. Users are invited to supply old photos of their loved ones, and the program uses deep learning to apply predetermined movements to their facial features.

Almost like animated, moving portraits in the Harry Potter franchise, photos once frozen in time are being brought to life with an artificial intelligence (A.I.) program called Deep Nostalgia. The technology, which was released on February 25 by the genealogy website MyHeritage, has since gone viral. Social media users have created lifelike moving portraits of mathematician Alan Turing, abolitionist Frederick Douglass and physicist Marie Curie, reports Mindy Weisberger for Live Science. The historical figures can blink, move their heads side-to-side, and even smile. The tech is also being used to animate artwork, statues and photos of ancestors.

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.

Emerging anxieties pertaining to the rapid advancement and sophistication of artificial intelligence appear to be on a collision course with historic models of human exceptionality and individuality. Yet it is not just objective, technical sophistication in the development of AI that seems to cause this angst. It is also the linguistic treatment of machine "intelligence." But what is really at stake? Are we truly concerned that we will be surpassed in our capacities as human beings?