I brought my dad back to life with this phone. I don’t really know how I feel

My father passed away shortly after his fourth birthday in 1992. He’s so young I have very few memories of him. My family only have small home movie clips that were shot in a short window before he passed away. But I have a still image selection, and for my new phone test, Honor 400 ProI realized that I was able to use AI to bring him back to life.

Be honest? I don’t know how I feel about it.

The phone is new Honor 400 Pro And it’s a wide, decent mobile phone, but packed with tools that use AI ( Google’s See-2 Model) Turn any image into a 5-second video. I was skeptical when I read the press release about it (as I usually do), but I found it to be really appealing. How does this work?

Open the tool in the Gallery app and select the source image from the photo in your camera roll and hit it. It takes about a minute to analyze the image, but the photo suddenly brings to life, like a magical picture from the world of Harry Potter. Don’t like the results? Simply tell them to generate again and you’ll get slightly different results.

I tried it with a variety of images. Sometimes it’s pretty modest (the image of a person reading it simply ended up turning the page), but otherwise it gets weirdly intense. Photos of a family of sheep were loaded onto a Scottish island, filmed in a Kodak Gold film (see right below). In the moving AI version, a flood of sheep was suddenly pouring into the frame before the camera angle cut into an aerial view of the entire flock running across the meadow. I think that’s what kids call “extras.” When I ran it with a cat pic, it threw a strange title for some inexplicable reasons (see further down).

But then I said it differently. I’ve been holding pictures of my dad on the shelf for decades. It shows him on stage where he plays bass in his band. That’s an image I love for many reasons, mainly because I was a musician myself and I liked how we had that in common. But that one photo is everything I saw him playing. I’ve certainly never been to a show and don’t think there’s any video footage of him playing. Until now, that’s it.

I fed the images to the app and hit a certain sense of fear. I was waiting for it to process before suddenly he was there. My dad moves around, choking his bass and visibly enters the spirit of performance. It transformed this little black and white painting that I had cherished for so long into something more. Something alive. It actually made me very emotional.

But then another part of my brain spoke. this it’s not My father. It’s not the atmosphere where he moves and moves the music. not much. That’s what Google’s algorithm imagines he would do. In many ways, he is a marionette, apparently grotesquely controlled by an invisible puppeteer, trying to give the impression of realistic movements.

I ran it a few times to see what options it would give me, but it was basically a small variation that he sways and sways while each playing bass. To be fair, AI did an amazing job here. The shadows are just moving, the microphone stays in place, and it looks like you’re actually playing a bass guitar. Also, it is still black and white, with various indications of grain and aging in film still present.

It gave me the impression that he might look on stage, so I think it made all the difference for me. There was no need to squint to ignore the strange errors and other random elements that the AI ​​could throw in.

So I remain divided into my feelings. On the one hand, how is it significant to make such a deceased loved one a doll, based solely on Google’s “best guess.” I showed it to my brother. My brother seemed to have almost the same attitude as me.

Meanwhile, it injected life into the photographs I had cherished for decades and gave me a glimpse into what my dad looked like on stage. And I loved seeing it, even if it wasn’t exactly real.

That’s definitely not the perfect solution for me. If I really remember him, I would rather look to actual home films than the images created by AI. However, such AI tools will ultimately bring true comfort to many people in this world along with their loved ones.

And I would like to think that with all the downsides of AI, this is one way you can do good things.