AI Ghosts Distort Human Faces

It’s a curse. Can we beat the ghost or do we have to join it?

Hallway by Peter H — Ghost by Stefan Keller — both from Pixabay. Blended digitally by Tucker Lieberman.

When cameras first appeared in the 19th century, many people didn’t trust photographs. Did they steal your soul? Was the image “real”?

You can see a few early photographic images in Kieran Zhane’s story, Evolution of the Camera. Ghostly possibilities are made evident in Spirit Photography and the Occult: Making the Invisible Visible by the Media of Mediumship for the UK’s National Science and Media Museum.

In ghost stories, a photo can reflect a supernatural state that isn’t otherwise obvious—like a curse.

For example, in the film The Ring (2002), photos are developed.

FilmComicsExplained on YouTube (9:30)

In some of them, the faces are distorted. This is meant to suggest that the teenagers were already cursed when the photo was taken.

FilmComicsExplained on YouTube (9:48)

A similar idea is in One Missed Call: Final (2006), when digital photography felt new. A computer mouse swipes over the photo, blurring…