Both my parents died from Cancer: my mom was first now 12 years ago, and then my dad followed her in 2020. It means I never got a chance to see them get old together, my mom never met my son or even my wife, my dad never got a chance to see my company succeed after a long period of uncertainty, but more than anything they never got a chance to be grow older together, at least in this reality.
A few months ago I wrote about the era of "reality interpolation" we were getting into: with AI's progress we are upscaling low definition photos, animating images automatically, re-creating information which was never captured in the first place, and building an approximation of reality.
I thought about owning that narrative multiple times and it became this: what if I could train an AI with old family pictures, recreate an older version of my dad and my mom which never existed, and reunite them together for one very last family picture, smiling, happy, and in good health.
So that's what I did: I trained a couple models with
@everartai , improved them a few times, did some photoshopping, a little Firefly, some upscaling in
@Magnific_AI, and then pulling them both in the freshly released
@LumaLabsAI's
#DreamMachine everyone has been enjoying these past few days.
At. the end, there is a little bit of an 'uncanny valley' thing going on and as much as I can feel they both are really close to looking like my parents there is this little "je ne sais quoi" not feeling exactly like them. This definitely still comes with the lay of the land when manipulating AI, model trainings and interpolating information but nevertheless amazing.
This is I think where AI can excel and surprisingly bring a touch of humanity by opening a different and unexpected new kind of door to the difficult and long grieving process.
Here's to you mom and dad for always lifting me up and teaching me to be curious, no matter what. I miss you guys...