FYI: AI helped me sort through old family videos in a way I never could before

I was cleaning out my attic and found a box of old home videos from the 90s. Remember when we had to hook up a VCR and fast forward through everything to find one moment? Last week, I used an AI program that scanned all the tapes and picked out the best clips automatically. It even tagged people and events, like birthdays and holidays, without me saying a word. I sat there watching it work, thinking about how my mom used to label each tape by hand with a marker. Now, I have a neat digital album in minutes instead of days. It really hit me how much simpler AI makes things we used to struggle with.

2 comments

2 Comments

sage_reed1mo ago

Found my sister's lost graduation speech that way.

lucast731mo ago

I read a piece in the New Yorker last month about this exact thing, how AI is quietly becoming the family historian. It's wild to me that we went from fuzzy tapes in a dusty box to an algorithm knowing my grandma's face better than I do. I tried a free trial of one of those services and it pulled a clip of my tenth birthday I had totally forgotten. There's something a little sad about losing the hunt through those physical tapes, but I can't argue with getting my whole childhood sorted in an afternoon. It feels like magic, but the kind that just does the boring work for you.

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