I tried bringing my memories to life with AI and found it works better with dogs than with human hands

MyHeritage gained a lot of attention for turning old photos into videos with its Deep Nostalgia technology in 2024, and they’re also the company behind DeepStory, which makes images speak by creating talking portraits from photos or paintings. Now, the company has upgraded the tech with its new LiveMemory tool.

Like Deep Nostalgia, LiveMemory uses AI to make short animated videos from still images that theoretically show what might have happened right after the photo was taken. It’s an upgraded version of the same feature, capable of making a kid on a bike in a picture ride away or a couple on their wedding day turn and kiss. Or at least that’s the pitch.

I decided to try it out myself, as it’s easy enough to use if you have an account and the MyHeritage mobile app. However, you only get a few tries with the free trial, and you need to pay up to remove the watermark.

To make a LiveMemory, you upload whatever picture you want to see transformed. A few minutes later, you get an email from MyHeritage with the video. To spare my friends and family, I started with a picture of myself and a much-missed pet dog named Malfoy. You can see the resulting video below.

Uncanny Nostalgia

I was mostly impressed with how much the tech has improved from Deep Nostalgia. The movements of my head and Malfoy’s head and body are quite realistic, and his tail, unseen in the photo, does look exactly like his actual tail. Even my wry expression is well observed, considering the AI still had to go on for the video.

That said, I don’t consider myself that wall-eyed, and while Malfoy’s tail looked right, it also looked like it was growing out of the side of his body. We used to joke that Malfoy was a dog built by a committee in the dark, but even he had his tail in the right location.

I decided to go simpler and just upload a straightforward portrait of myself at about a year old. You can see how that went below.

Boneless boy

Again, the expressions are great; it looks like I’m really enjoying a joke, and my head and neck are moving like an actual human being. On the other hand, the AI doesn’t seem to realize that the young child in the image would definitely not have that many teeth gleaming in his mouth. Those teeth apparently stole all of the digital bones from my hands. Watching my clay-like fingers squish each other and occasionally pass through each other like monstrous tentacles is more likely to induce nausea than nostalgia.

Compare that to the official launch video from MyHeritage, seen below. You can tell that even if there will be a lot of videos that people don’t like, the ones that hit the mark will be very popular, just like Deep Nostalgia. Maybe just be careful not to use photos where hands are clasped together like mine.