So that’s where they’re coming from
Got an email from MyHeritage, the family tree site, offering to let me try a thing called Deep Nostalgia™. I knew it was going to be that creepy deep fake face animation thing. And it was.
You know, where someone takes a mug shot of Hilter and credibly animates him singing “Yes, We Have No Bananas.” That thing. Lot of it about lately. Here’s an example, if you can stand to go to Faceache.
Well, the MyHeritage one doesn’t make granny sing. There are a whole slew of websites and apps that do this, I found when I poked around (Mug Life is an iPad version that seems to do a better than average job).
Back to MyHeritage, I uploaded a picture of a weasel first, but I got an error message telling me the app couldn’t detect a face.
Rude.
So I uploaded an actual picture of my face. I was smiling and wearing shades, which confused it a little. It did a moderately clever job of it, for the most part. I didn’t think the animated version was a very good likeness, but none of us is a good judge of our own face.
I notice it struggles most with the silhouette after bigger shifts in head angle, not surprisingly. Still, if it’s this good now, calculated in realtime, running on a web-based app, I can’t imagine how good it’s going to get.
I can see this posing a major problem to someone who’s bereaved.
March 24, 2021 — 7:28 pm
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