Denis Shiryaev is an AI wizard who has liberally
applied his magic to old film—upscaling,
colorizing, and otherwise modernizing scenes.
Shiryaev’s casual distribution of these
efforts on YouTube can make us take for granted
just how extraordinary they are.
Such recreations would have been impossible
just a decade or so ago.
But we should not see these as historic restorations.
The software Shiryaev uses fills in gaps between
the frames, allowing him to upscale the frame
rate and make more naturistic-looking images.
This often comes at a cost.
As Ted Mills wrote in an earlier Open Culture
post on Shiryaev’s methods, “there are
a lot of artifacts, squooshy, morphing moments
where the neural network can’t figure things
out.”
But it’s an evolving technology.
Unlike wizards of old, Shiryaev happily reveals
his trade secrets so enterprising coders can
give it a try themselves, if they’ve got
the budget.
In his latest video, he plugs the NVIDIA Quadro
RTX 6000, a $4,000 graphics card, before getting
to the fun stuff.
Rather than make old film look new, he’s
“applied a bunch of different neural networks
in an attempt to generate realistic faces
of people from famous paintings.”
These are, Shiryaev emphasizes, “estimations,”
not historical recreations of the faces behind
Leonardo’s Mona Lisa.
The GIF-like “transformations,” as they
might be called, may remind us of a less fun
use of such technology: AI’s ability to
create realistic faces of people who don’t
exist for devious purposes and to make “deep
fake” videos of those who do.
