My dad died just after my fourth birthday in 1992. Being so young, I have few memories of him and my family has only a small handful of home movie clips, filmed in the brief window before he died. But I do have a selection of still pictures and in my testing of a new phone, the Honor 400 Pro, I found I was able to bring him to life using AI.
Honestly? I really don't know how to feel about it.
The original still image of my dad (left) and the AI-created video of him (right). Andrew Lanxon/CNET
The phone is the new Honor 400 Pro and while it's broadly a decent handset, it packs a tool that uses AI (powered by Google's VEO-2 model) to turn any image into a 5-second video. I was skeptical when I read the press release about it (as I usually am), but I found it genuinely fascinating to use. Here's how it works.
You open the tool within the gallery app, choose your source image from any picture you have in your camera roll and hit go. It takes about a minute to analyze the image but then that picture suddenly springs to life, like a magical picture from the world of Harry Potter. Don't like the result? Simply tell it to generate again and you'll get a slightly different outcome.
The original still image. Andrew Lanxon/CNET
The AI-created video version (converted into a lower-quality gif format). Andrew Lanxon/CNET
I've tried it on various images with mixed results. Sometimes it's pretty low-key (an image of someone reading a book simply resulted in them turning a page), while other times it goes weirdly hard. I loaded in a picture of a family of sheep on a Scottish island that I shot on Kodak Gold film (seen just below). In the moving AI version, there was suddenly a flood of sheep pouring through the frame before the camera angle cuts to an aerial view of a whole flock running across a meadow. I think that's what the kids call "extra." Ditto when I ran it on a picture of my cat and it threw in bizarre-looking titles for some baffling reason (seen further down).
The original still image of this family of sheep. Andrew Lanxon/CNET
The AI-created video version (converted into a lower-quality gif format). Andrew Lanxon/CNET
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