When I look at the list of notable people on Wikipedia whose birthdays are today, I can often mouse over their name and see their picture. Presumably Wikipedia is running a script that fetches the article about that person and looks for their image. If it finds the image, it displays it as long as your mouse is hovering over the person’s name.
But this is not really satisfying, because people live long and varied lives. For example, today is Neil Young’s birthday.
When I mouse over his name I see an image of him the way he is now. But in the collective minds of music fans, there is still that other Neil Young — the young man who helped to revolutionize popular music in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
I think that ideally every image should come with an age slider. When the image pops up, you have the option of choosing the age at which you would like to see them.
This should not be too difficult, since there tend to be large numbers of images of notable people on-line. One might object that it would be prohibitive to scrape the Web to fetch all of those images, and then synthesize them on the fly.
Which is why we might want to rethink the way we represent on-line images of people. Rather than the current fixed formats like JPEG or PNG, we could convert each person’s visage into an composite created by training an AI model from multiple images, each labeled by age.
A person’s image would then be stored as a latent space representation. When someone asks to see an image of that person at a particular age, a variational decoder would quickly produce the desired result.
Look at how the time goes past. Happy birthday, Neil Young.