As they sing, the musicians stare at fadedblack-and-whitephotographs they hold.
The young soldiers in the old pictures blink and smile back at them, thanks to artificial intelligence.
The result is uncanny.
The past comes to life,Harry Potter style.
Weve found that AI has the potential to weaken peoplescapacity to make ordinary judgments.
Now AI is making it easier than ever to reanimate the past.
Will that change how we understand history and, as a result, ourselves?
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Civil War or Revolutionary War reenactments are commonplace.
Live reenactments and carefully processed historical footage are expensive and time-consuming undertakings.
But as with all new technologies, alongside the exciting possibilities are serious moral questions.
Political identity, in his view, is not simply what people make of it.
It is not merely a product of our own fabrication.
If these images spur empathy and concern for ancestors, deepfakes can make the past matter a lot more.
But this capability comes with risk.
One obvious danger is the creation of fake historical episodes.
It later turned out the attacknever happened.
An atrophying of the imagination
It used to be difficult and expensive to stage fake events.
The upshot, of course, is that deepfakes may gradually destabilize the very idea of a historical event.
But beyond anxieties about the wholesale fabrication of history, there are subtler consequences that worry me.
But will people keep exerting their imagination in that way?
Or will deepfakes, with their lifelike, moving depictions, become the practical stand-ins for history?
People tend to think that technology makes life easier.
The advent of smartphones meant photos could be posted online with ease.
Nor is getting lost experienced the same way since the ubiquity of GPS.
Similarly, AI-generated deepfakes are not just tools that will automatically enhance our understanding of the past.
Nevertheless, this technology will soon revolutionize societys connection to history, for better and worse.
This incapacity to imagine the underside of technical achievements is not destiny.
It is still possible to slow down and think about the best way to experience the past.
