AI Transforms Memories Into Real Images
April 25, 2024
This essay is the work of a dumb dinobaby. No smart software required.
Human memory is unreliable. It’s unreliable because we forget details, remember things incorrectly, believe things happened when they didn’t, and have different perspectives. We rely on human memory for everything, especially when it comes to recreating the past. The past can be recorded and recreated but one company is transforming photos into real images. The Technology Review explains how in, “Generative AI Can Turn Your Most Precious Memories Into Photos That Never Existed.”
Synthetic Memories is a studio that takes memories and uses AI to make them real. Pau Garcia founded the studio and got the idea to start Synthetic Memories after speaking with Syrian refugees. An elderly Syrian wanted to capture her memories for her descendants and Garcia graffitied a building to record them. His idea has taken off:
"Dozens of people have now had their memories turned into images in this way via Synthetic Memories, a project run by Domestic Data Streamers. The studio uses generative image models, such as OpenAI’s DALL-E, to bring people’s memories to life. Since 2022, the studio, which has received funding from the UN and Google, has been working with immigrant and refugee communities around the world to create images of scenes that have never been photographed, or to re-create photos that were lost when families left their previous homes.”
Domestic Data Streamers are working in a building next to the Barcelona Design Museum to record and recreate people’s memories of the city. Anyone is allowed to add a memory to the archive.
In order to recreate a memory, Garcia and his team developed a simple process. An interviewer sits with a subject, who then asks them to recount a memory. A prompt engineer writes a prompt for a model on a laptop to generate an image. Garcia’s team have written an entire glossary of prompting terms. The terms need to be edited to be accurate, so the engineers work with the subjects.
Garcia and his team learned that older subjects connect better with physical copies of their images. Images that are also blurry and warped resonate more with people too, because memories aren’t remembered in crisp detail. Garcia also stresses it is important to remember the difference between synthetic images and real photography. He says synthetic memories aren’t meant to be factual. He worries that if a larger company use better versions of DALL-E they’ll forgo older models for photorealism.
Whitey Grace, April 25, 2024
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